Chetan Sharma, a very influential mobile industry analyst every year polls the industry insiders including leaders of some of the biggest and most important networking and telecom companies. He seeks their opinions on the year that was, and what to expect in the year to come.

“Over the course of the decade, the number of connections more than doubled, smartphones jumped 20x, and cellular data traffic grew 333,000 times,” Sharma points out in his report. “In 2020, 44 Zettabytes of digital information will be created. Over 420 Exabytes of mobile data traffic (which btw will grow 15x+ in the next 5 years).”

Person of the year: Steve Jobs. Despite being only a small part of the decade, his vision and his product roadmap defined the decade and was the overwhelming favorite for the person of the decade (only executives who have been chosen person of the year in prediction surveys of the last decade qualified)

Company of the decade: Apple. Apple continued to set the standard on device and applications/services ecosystem that influenced the global economy. Amazon, Facebook, and Google played their respective roles, but no one rose to the level of Apple’s influence in the decade.

Chetan Sharma’s Blog.

It is hard to think about the future, without tipping your hat to Steve Jobs and his company, Apple. The iPhone led to a demand for a new generation of smartphones and the Android ecosystem fulfilled that demand. I don’t think countries like India, or the African Continent would have enjoyed the Internet and connectivity without Google’s OS. It all started with Jobs pushing for a computer in your pocket, that occasionally made phone calls. It changed humans fundamentally as it has reshaped how we live, how we create, and how we consume. The idea of information has changed. It has changed social norms and it has become part of human existence, for good and bad.