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In 1999 when Palm Pilots and Blackberries were there, showing a clear trend towards greater handheld power after things like brick cellphones and gameboys? Yea

• rchaud 7y ago
  Back then, the business model that incentivized mass data harvesting didn't exist, and neither did the infrastructure necessary to store and process those mountains of data. In 1999, only the original Blackberry and Palm VII "could" do mobile data. I use quotation marks because they both relied on a very rickety, bandwidth constrained Mobitex network that could barely send and receive text-only emails for a few hundred concurrent users, let alone real-time geolocation and web browsing data across billions of devices. Even then, Blackberry had to route every single email through their own servers to compress it before transmission. Blackberry's business model, like Apple's, was built around an integrated hardware-software solution. There was no incentive to sell their data to advertisers. That only started with the search and social media companies that had no other way of making money.