Charles on… anything that comes along

I was reading Andrew Orlowski’s piece looking at the maths of the Long Tail®™© (Chris Anderson’s pet theory, which as one does with a pet, he has nurtured and taken for long walks, and fed, and now gets back plenty from it in return) when I came across this interesting bootnote:

For a facts and figures man who is wary of speculation, Anderson can be quite reckless. The Wired editor lost a wager with your reporter [ie Orlowski] recently, which he made three years ago. Anderson bet that by spring of 2006 the sales of WLAN chipsets would exceed sales of cellular (GSM and CDMA) chipsets. He fell short by around a billion units.

I wonder why Chris Anderson had that view of the world. Why did he think - because he would have to have done, eh? - that developing countries would adopt WLANs rather than GSM/CDMA sets? It puts an awful lot of faith in the spread of computers compared to mobile phones, and we all know that a mobile is a lot more use in almost any situation in a developing country.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• A mobile phone pandemic? (12 March 2005; score: 60.95%)
• What causes fires at petrol stations? It's sort of obvious (28 March 2005; score: 56.48%)
• If you outlaw mobile phones on planes, only.. everyone will use mobiles (18 July 2005; score: 55.21%)