What Just Happened ?

Mary Meeker and her team at Morgan Stanley published an updated Internet Trends mega-deck yesterday.  It updates her startling predictions of a few months ago.  Here’s a cheat sheet to the slides you need to read to avoid being left wondering “what just happened?” in mobile marketing.

• The mobile internet continues to ramp far faster than the desktop internet did.  The interesting implication is that this river is rushing past you much faster than the internet did — your time-to-market margin for error with mobile is shrinking faster every day (Slide 7).
• Morgan Stanley predicts mobile internet users will outnumber desktop users within five years (Slide 8).  Note not just the intersection point predicted here, but the slope of each line.  They also believe that this phenomenon will be “bigger than most think” with 3G, social, video, VoIP and more sophisticated mobile devices converging (Slide 22).
• Social networking is surpassing email (Slide 12).  Much of this phenomenon is unevenly distributed by demographic, but it’s still important to remember, especially regarding social + mobile marketing.
• For you macro-econ fans: Morgan Stanley asserts that we are now two years into a ten year mobile internet computing cycle (Slide 17).
• Boss still not convinced your company needs social media presence?  Facebook and YouTube saw the biggest growth in share over past three years (Slide 31).
• “Game-Changing” platforms integrating social networking and mobile “emerging very rapidly” (Slides 45 - 60).  Skim these slides for a quick overview of many significant developments and their impacts.
• Mobile phone usage is becoming more data-intensive, used less for voice over time (Slide 62). 

The deck ends with this pithy prediction: “Rapid ramp of mobile internet usage will be a boon to consumers and some companies will likely win big (potentially very big) while many will wonder what just happened.”