Old or Young, SmartPhone or No, Forget Stats: It’s The Apps!

It’s all about managing change. Let’s wrap my two most recent posts together: older people don’t “get” SmartPhones, and iPads are cannibalizing laptop computer sales.

One statement is anecdotal, the other driven by anecdotal statistics. In the end, though, managing business change successfully is a mix; you need to find and understand statistics and anecdotal information.

So forget for a moment the 54-year-old who had such a hard time understanding her SmartPhone, and forget the statistics about how many iPads BestBuy is selling as their laptop computer sales go into the tank. For clues on business change and technology look at how people actually use their SmartPhones.

According to Appolicious, age, income level and professional aspirations are all factors when it comes to picking a SmartPhone. OK, makes sense. I’ll go farther and say something that can’t be tracked at all: intelligence matters, too. In fact, it matters more.

Don’t get all angry, please. I’m not trying to generalize about how those of us using Android phones are smarter than people who like iPhones. Actually, I’m not judging intelligence level at all; I’m talking about intelligence type.

Yes, your age effects how you see the world. So does you gender, where you were brought up, what your parents did for a living and what you do. But if you look at is the information Appolicious presents in that post I’ve linked about you’ll see statistics that contradict each other. You’ll probably see statistics that don’t make sense to you at all, too.

When making your business change plans, the most important variable is you. As a business person you need to know when to trust your gut. Statistics are great, and so are generalizations based on the things that “everyone knows”, but they’re tools.

And you’re . . . well, you’re the biggest tool of all. ;-)