Dear readers, you might remember that last year, I posted about Mary Meeker's annual report on the internet. Well, just as summer inevitably turns to Autumn, Ms. Meeker reports again from the frontier of the internet and shows us where the gold is buried. You can read her presentation below. In it, Ms. Meeker reveals something that those of us laboring in the technology sector already knew: The rain hasn't been that heavy for us. Economically speaking, technology has been relatively stable compared to other segments of the economy. Technology IPOs are still way off from 2000, but that's a good thing, right? Afterall, I'd rather not take that balloon ride again. Ms. Meeker identifies mobile access to the internet to be the guiding trend and, for the record, let's look at her track record for calling trends:
2004 - China internet
2005 - Broadband
2006 - Online video
2007 - Social networks
2008 - Economic recession
2009 - Mobile internet
I'd say that in 2004, her eyes were dazzled by China the same way Western eyes have been dazzled since even before Marco Polo.
In 2005, Broadband was a pretty good call as we did see enormous take up of home broadband.
For 2006, online video was a pretty good call and certainly foreshadowed some very significant developments such as consumer-priced cameras and YouTube and all that.
Social networks in 2007. Sure. That was a good call.
2008 was an economic recession and when she made her prediction in November of that year, the abyss was yawning, dark and deep. It was hard to see anything past that.
2009: Mobile. I'll buy that. Anyone with a modern cellphone these days knows what she's talking about. I remember when the iPhone first reached market, some people were complaining about the battery life. What those people didn't factor in to their complaints was that they had never had a device that was so amazingly useful that they always had it on, working hard on some sort of problem. Of course the battery life is short is you're going to constantly hit a 3G or WiFi connection to pull down webpages, email and other flotsam and jetsam from the internet.
On the whole, I'll repeat my recommendation to spend some time with Ms. Meeker's work and incorporate it in your perspective. Well worth it.
