The lesson I take from reading Mary Meeker’s mammoth new report on the mobile internet is the degree to which Silicon Valley is in a position to dominate it, just as it did the wired internet.
Since Ms Meeker, a veteran Morgan Stanley analyst, was one of the sages/seers of the first internet wave, what she says about the growth of the mobile internet deserves to be taken seriously even if it involves wading through the 425-page full version.
To be honest, I have not done that but I have read the comparatively modest 92-slide presentation (itself a brief form of the full 659 slides available to devotees).
The message that leaps out is that, although the US lagged Asia and Europe in adoption of mobile phones, and of 3G technology, it has established a stronghold in mobile software and platforms.
That means that companies led by Apple and Facebook are in a position to lead, and to extract the most revenues from – a rapid shift from the fixed to mobile internet. She says that more people will connect to the internet on mobile devices than fixed ones within five years.
As Ms Meeker (and a team of Morgan Stanley analysts) puts it:
“It’s notable that, after years in the backwaters of global mobile development, American companies (led by the likes of Apple, Facebook, Amazon.com and Google) are becoming mobile internet innovation pacesetters.”
Conversely, she argues that Nokia and Chinese companies, which dominate the low-end, high-volume handset market face a shifting of the profit pool to Apple and Research in Motion.
Among companies Morgan Stanley says are “challenged” by this shift are Nokia and Sony-Ericcson, as well as the video games makeers Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.
The report makes it glaringly obvious why Facebook has recently upset many users by trying to prod them to loosen their private settings. Ms Meeker again:
“We believe Facebook has the potential to serve as a communications platform/engine of one-to-one, one-to-some and one-to-many (and visa versa) for the mobile Internet.”
Incidentally, Morgan Stanley is presumably competing hard for a lead role in the likely Facebook initial public offering, for which this report may come in useful.
