“Researchers learned that its owners helped spread the iPhone virus spread rapidly throughout their social network. A person with just one iPhone-carrying friend was three times more likely to own one themselves than a person whose friends had no iPhones. People with two friends who had iPhones were more than five times as likely to have sprung for the Apple device. Apparently the iPhone virus was highly contagious.
“Its pattern differed from the way other devices and services rippled through the customer base. For instance, other Telenor products, including the Doro, a simple handset generally marketed at the elderly, did not exhibit the same kind of network effects. Neither did a video-calling feature introduced by Telenor in 2007, which grew in popularity at first but suffered after a new pricing model was introduced.”
