Ericsson was ahead of Apple with a toad – Swedish Dagbladet

Stefan Magnusson, Bears Kläboe, Cecilia Ericsson and Marten Skoger testing the new tablet device 2000. Photo: Lars Astrom

The history of Ericsson Web Screen is short and intense: At launch at CeBIT in February 2000 was awarded Ericsson a prize for its innovations and for their enthusiastic involvement in the development of Bluetooth.

The products had a great future, was the assessment. 18 months later judged both the products and the market in a completely different way, and the bet was canceled.

With hindsight we can say that there was nothing wrong with the idea of ​​being able to surf wirelessly from your couch. But around the turn of the millennium, when the dot-com bubble burst and the 3G rollout was still slow, seemed decision probably quite logical.

For the next ten years matured both markets and technologies, and paved the way for the new tablet plates that were well received by the market.

During the period 2010 to 2014 was around 619 million tablets. If we assume that the average price remained at 5000 kr / tablet market can be said to have had a turnover around 3095 billion or 370 billion dollars. Little more than the 100 billion dollars it did ten years earlier.

Company History

Company History is the only magazine about business history and offers exciting stories about people, events , products and companies. Company History is published four times a year by the Centre for Business History. Read more on foretagshistoria.se.

This article is written by Krister Hillerud, vice president of the Center for Business History.