Mobile is eating the world, and the proof is in a quite famous presentation by Benedict Evans from the Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz which has been updated in 2016.
I share here some highlights which have particularly struck me.
First, mobile will represent a roughly 5-10x increase in the number of users and devices compared to the previous ecosystems, and is quite comparable to the move to personal PCs, as shown in the figure on the right. And this means everyone has a super computer in his/her pocket. The presentation goes on to argue that this will also lead to a significant increase of productivity. That might be true in theory, but I think this can be controversial as mobile devices are also a great source of lost time! (ref our post on How Mobile Phones Distract Us – A Real Life Example).
Mobile is an ecosystem and actually most people use apps to access the data of the internet. What happens is that actually, people don’t use a lot of apps on their mobile devices, hence there are much less valuable online properties, but they are quite more valuable. Actually one third of the users access the internet through Facebook!!
Finally, we are just at the beginning of the disruption brought by mobile devices in the business models that pervaded the world before, so hold on!
The full presentation is available below:
