Back in 2003, I gave a speech introducing Holway’s Martini Moment. My ambition that one day I would be able to connect to the internet ‘anytime, anywhere from any device’. We also issued various crazy predictions about MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices). Basically that mobile access would overtake, and in the end supplant, ‘fixed’ internet access.
Last year, with help from Qualcomm, we issued a forecast that by 2020 the number of devices capable of accessing the internet would exceed 11b – over 90% (10b)
of them mobile. That’s up from 2b today. (See Earthquake or access the full slide-deck for full details.) As many readers pointed out that’s getting on for two MIDs for every man, woman and child on the planet. Although, as I've got at least 4 of them myself, the distribution isn't quite like that!
I was therefore very interested in the publicity given in the last few days to a report from The Mobile World which estimated that already the number of phones (6.92b) exceeded the current estimate of the world’s population (6.91b). 5.6b of these are mobile and 1.32b fixed. Of course only a minority of these mobile phones (and probably a minority of the fixed lines) are capable of accessing the internet. But other studies show, for example, that c70% of mobile phones sold in the UK this year will be smartphones (ie capable of internet access). A recent Olswang report found that 22% of UK mobile subscribers already had a smartphone. 31% for 24-35 year olds. Comscore found similar penetration in the US. Another report from Berg Insight forecast a 74% growth in smartphone shipments in 2011. So I suspect that we are well on track to meet our 2020 forecasts.
The implications of all this for every single TechMarketView subscriber are simply huge. Business models unchanged for 50 years are now becoming obsolete. New players are coming to eat the lunch (and breakfast and dinner) of the established players as IT moves into a mobile, and inevitably a Cloud, world.