When Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in January of 2007, he announced a goal of selling 10 million units by the end of 2008, a target that many analysts thought ambitious even though it would have amounted to only about one percent of the global handset market. Just four years later, with sales of 18.6 million iPhones in the previous quarter alone, Apple has now topped Nokia to become the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world, by revenue.

I am admittedly a bit of an Apple fanboy (and for the sake of disclosure, I own a handful of AAPL shares in my IRA) but I'm not writing this to be all gloaty or anything. I'm just awed by the scale of the transformation, and how totally blindsided the competition seemed to be in retrospect. Hell, even Apple didn't seem to fully grasp the transformational power of their new invention, as evidenced by the company's initial resistance to third-party apps.

But more than just awe inspiring, I find the iPhone-fueled smartphone revolution oddly uplifting in how it demonstrates the power of raw innovation to reshape both our institutions and our daily lives. If only our politicians could think different, they might manage to get us out of our current jam.