The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything

The Mobile Wave argues that the changes brought by mobile computing are so big and widespread that it’s impossible for us to see it all, even though we are all immersed in it. Saylor explains that the current generation of mobile smart phones and tablet computers has set the stage to become the universal computing platform for the world. In the hands of billions of people and accessible anywhere and anytime, mobile computers are poised to become an appendage of the human being and an essential tool for modern life.

With the perspective of a historian, the precision of a technologist, and the pragmatism of a CEO, Saylor provides a panoramic view of the future mobile world. He describes how:

Soon, it will be cheaper to learn to read with a tablet than paper, which means every literate person on the planet will have a mobile device from a younger age and will carry it with them everywhere their entire lives. Over five billion people will always be on the network. Mobile will turn retail into theater, make a Harvard-level education accessible to everyone, and bring the global information flow to the most backward village in Africa, leaving us amid so much information we'll need a new Google to search our surroundings.

The Fifth Wave will distill a variety of changes in the global marketplace that we can all see and feel into a coherent framework for understanding the future that is about to unfold.

Michael Saylor is the chairman and CEO of the publicly traded company MicroStrategy. With degrees in engineering as well as Science, Technology, and Society from MIT, he is a science historian, and a formidable intellectual whom Slate called “mesmerizing.” He is not just a high-tech entrepreneur, but also a serious scholar whose success in business stems from his obsession since college—and really since childhood—with understanding what Thomas Kuhn called the “structure of scientific revolutions.” He has appeared on TV interview shows including 60 Minutes and Charlie Rose, and has been profiled in Newsweek, Time, Slate, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.