>Explosion in the early 90s != everybody used them in the early 90s.
Never said that
>Explosion = the industry got traction / was kickstarted and kept on going and going.
No, explosion means something along the lines of "a sudden outburst". Anything that plods along slowly cannot be considered an explosion. The slope of your own reference is rather timid until at the later nineties.
>As contrasted with VR which in 90-92 there was a huge hype, and it got nowhere, people forgot about it, and it was resurrected 10-15 years later.
Not the same thing. The tech simply didn't exist. At least, not in a manner which we would deem acceptable. Cell phone tech was fine, but it was simply too expensive.
>Err, the graph starts around 1988 -- and the "increase" is sustained from then until the end of the graph (and probably still today).
It is not "sustained": it begins increasing rapidly in the late 90's! In other words, it "explodes". Let's be honest here; in a response to another person you claimed that the plot showed 1B users, but the Y axis only goes to 300M. I'm not convinced you can even read that thing.
>Anything that plods along slowly cannot be considered an explosion
That's a pedantic distinction (not that I mind). I wasn't going for "explosion" as in "suddenly tons of people had one", but as in "suddenly there was a boom and a new viable market had emerged".
How hard is to get my main point?
Mobile got some kind of kickstart in the early 90s (I called it an explosion, but I could not care less if it's not that, that's not my point), and it never stopped going. Perhaps you'd agree if I'd merely called it "a bang" in the 90s? A starting point for big growth?
That was my point in a throwaway response I made at someone's comment that "mobile was like VR" at the start of this thread.
Whether that can be called an explosion or not, I could not care less. In my country, that's what we'd call it. There was a market that started from almost nothing before (some flat numbers in the US, almost zero in most of Europe). Unlike early 90s VR, which was a short hype in 1990 or so that then stopped.
From 1990 onwards, every year we had a big boost in the sub numbers. As I wrote, from a few dozen in 1990 (~16M globally) to ~1 Billion in 2000 (~ 800M to be precise).
That's explosive growth in my book, and I've lived several others techs that never seen such rapid growth. The only comparable thing would be the internet itself (from mostly academics in 1990 to a huge economic force in 2000). To contrast, it took 5 decades of development for PCs to get to the same point.
In any case, my focus wasn't on it being an "explosion" part, but on it never have been an "hype/unhype" cycle like early VR was. Unlike 90s VR hype (and other hypes) mobile merely went from strength to strength.
>Not the same thing. The tech simply didn't exist.
Sure, but that didn't stop the media and companies then to hype it for a couple of years. And then forget about it for 15+ years.
Explosion in the early 90s != everybody used them in the early 90s.
Explosion = the industry got traction / was kickstarted and kept on going and going.
Just as in the chart.
As contrasted with VR which in 90-92 there was a huge hype, and it got nowhere, people forgot about it, and it was resurrected 10-15 years later.
>You: no I was right the first time, look at this graph which shows an exponential increase in use in the early 2000's.
Err, the graph starts around 1988 -- and the "increase" is sustained from then until the end of the graph (and probably still today).