Seeing as how I work for a web-development company I see 'the numbers' regularly, and they're really pretty astounding.
One of our clients is a regional (SW USA) Cable TV company, and we built their consumer portal for them ... so I have access to the Google Analytics info on how people connect to the portal ... to manage their accounts, billing, set up what shows to record on their home DVR, etc ...
And I mean it seems to me (traditionalist as I am) like the kinda scenario where *most* people would jump on their home PC or laptop to deal with it, so they have a good-sized window to look at to figure out how to do ... whatever it is 'they're there for' ... but it turns out ... NOPE.
I shit you not, over 90% of the traffic on this site I'm referring to ... is people accessing it on their mobile phones.
Our shop is starting major website development projects now for large companies ... where we DON'T SUPPORT non-mobile access to the site (of course, things that 'work' on mobile phones, nearly always at least 'work' on desktop/tablet/laptop).
It's somewhat obscure to the end-user, but there's a typically a tremendous amount of 'styling' that goes into making a site 'look nice' in a way that's appropriate to the screen size and orientation of the end user. THere's all kinds of switches and scaling and such that happens in the code, IOW, so that the experience of viewing the site on a wide screen on your desktop (typically 1920Wx1080H) looks good ... whereas viewing it on a mobile browser which is turned the other way (1080Wx1920H) still also looks good. That doesn't happen by accident.
However, like I say ... the numbers favoring 'mobile' use worldwide have become so friggin' STAGGERING that companies are now just saying 'f*** the desktop, we don't even care. Let them have the same skinny portrait-oriented experience as the mobile users, even though theirs is a landscape view. Just stack everything top to bottom for the mobile users, and let the desktop people scroll down endlessly ... instead of spreading the info in a useful manner from left to right when the resolution is wide ... cause frankly, there's not enough of those users to matter anymore'.
Anyways, the fact that MICROSOFT completely failed to get any significant foothold into this tectonic paradigm shift AFA an operating system goes ... is a f***ing MASSIVE FAIL. It's very likely to lead to serious, serious retraction in the size of both their company, and their influence, over the next 10 years. I expect Apple as a company to be considerably bigger than Microsoft within the next 5 years. Why? There's lots of reasons, but IPHONE ... is very easily 'the biggest'.
= new reply since forum marked as read
