Mobile & Cloud

The Mobile & Cloud period opens on 9 January 2007, when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at Macworld in San Francisco, then released it commercially on 29 June the same year. The convergence of telephone, music player and web browser on a single multi-touch device, completed by the App Store in July 2008, redefined consumer computing. In parallel, Google, which had acquired Android Inc. in 2005, launched under Andy Rubin's leadership the first Android phone (HTC Dream) in September 2008, followed by the open-source model that would quickly dominate global market share. The smartphone became, within a decade, the most widely diffused computer in history, exceeding five billion units in use in 2019. On the server side, Amazon Web Services, launched in 2006 with S3 and EC2, drove an industrialisation of hosting: Google released App Engine in 2008 and Google Cloud Platform in 2011, while Microsoft Azure was unveiled in 2008 and made generally available in 2010. Containerisation, foreshadowed by LXC and popularised by Docker (Solomon Hykes, 2013), then orchestrated by Kubernetes (Google, 2014), turned software operations into declarative pipelines. The SaaS model (Salesforce from 1999, Google Docs from 2006, Office 365 from 2011) generalised the monthly-rented application. The rollout of 4G LTE from 2010 and then of 5G from 2019 made the consumption of bandwidth-hungry applications transparent. Uber (2009), Airbnb (2008), WhatsApp (2009), Instagram (2010) and Snapchat (2011) exploited the smartphone as a social and geolocated sensor. This decade also saw the explosion of deep learning, with Geoffrey Hinton, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever's AlexNet winning ImageNet in 2012, and with TensorFlow, released by Google in November 2015 under the Apache licence, becoming the reference framework. Nvidia's CUDA GPUs, originally designed for gaming, reinvented themselves as AI research engines. The period closed around 2020 on a global infrastructure in which cloud, mobile and machine learning were fully entangled, preparing the shift toward consumer generative AI.