Another part of my effort to explain that while I see radical change on the horizon in other areas, I have a blind spot how those things will affect auditing.
(Cross-posted from my other blog, Outrun Change.)
1/19 – Mark Mills at Forbes – The Mobile Revolution Has Only Just Begun – Look again at the radical change in the last century:
Not only have radios become cheap but they’ve collapsed in size while rising in capability. A trailer-pulled radio that weighed one ton in WWI is now a chipset weighing a fraction of an ounce buried inside a smartphone that can handle one million-fold more traffic than those first Marconis.
Combine that with a computer the size of a phone and you have a smart phone.
Add to that the entire ‘app’ concept. You then have a bigger revolution in computer power than the desktop PC, according to Mr. Mills.
With half a million available apps, you can access anything on the cloud from anywhere at anytime. The ‘app industry’ as he calls it, is a $100B a year field.
There has been $2 trillion invested in the supporting infrastructure in the last four years and another $4 trillion planned for the next half decade.
That is a huge industry, comparable to the worldwide infrastructure spending on water and energy.
That is hard to get your brain around.
Yet that is just the start.
The revolution in the App industry is merely getting started. He can only vaguely see the impact on finance and health care, which will be huge.
He suggests we are only at the end of the beginning of the mobile revolution.
At a simplistic level, look at the impact we already have on small things. While watching a movie at home with friends, someone asks, “what was that other movie she was in, with what’s his name?” In half a minute, someone shares what’s his name’s name, movie title, release date, and box office gross. While sitting in the comfy chair.
And in bigger things. I needed to research how to write an audit opinion last week. Had an oddity I’ve not seen before. In a few seconds I was looking at the AICPA’s rules on modified opinions and identified the correct wording.
Last week I agreed to do the technical review on a CCH product. After we came to terms, in a few minutes the editor had sent me the huge number of files I’ll need to review. In a few minutes at the cost of just her time, the files were on my computer.
Five years ago she would have had to print three or four reams of paper, spend $10 or $20 to ship them, and I’d see the package in a week.
I was a foot-dragging late adopter of smart phones. Have been using mine for about six months. It is staggering to explore what is possible.
I grasp that the massive changes we see today in the whole app field are just the start of what will happen. Can’t tell what that future will look like, but it will be big.
Even though today’s storm surge is just starting to recede, I can see there is something huge out on the ocean’s horizon. And it’s coming our way.