They won't be. Smartphones will be disrupted by something else. People aren't using PDAs anymore either; they use smartphones. Eventually, something will come a

They won't be. Smartphones will be disrupted by something else. People aren't using PDAs anymore either; they use smartphones. Eventually, something will come along that will make people stop using smartphones. His point is that you can't be successful building something that is essentially the same thing as a smartphone. You can build something that disrupts the current smartphone market, but it would likely need to be something more than a smartphone (a la Google Glass.) The network effects you mention are exactly the point: network effects are especially powerful in things like mobile app stores because they create a tipping point market. That means if an early entrant or set of entrants into the market can capture enough market share, they create extremely high barriers to entry. The more market share they have, the more powerful the network effects are and the less likely a new entrant is to have success. If you're a smartphone developer, chances are you develop for iOS and Android. It would take tens of millions of users adopting a new platform for you to start developing for this new platform. But you're not likely to get tens of millions of users without a large app library.