Juggernaut
eMarketer has some spanky graphs from the Ipsos report that came out this week about the worldwide growth of the Mobile Internet and another one from A.T.Kearney last October. It's nice to see this stuff finally got some traction in the blogosphere... it's important data after all, though nothing too surprising if you've been following the trends for a while.
The numbers on a macro level are pretty easy to see: There's roughly 1B internet users on PCs, and there's 2B mobile phone users, of whom Ipsos is saying that 28% - or 560M people - are using the mobile internet. Now, the growth of PC users is expected to remain pretty flat, but mobile subscriber numbers are expected to grow to 3B over the next 18 months to 2 years (depending on who's waving their hands excitedly). So if you take Ipsos numbers at face value, even if that percentage of mobile internet users stays flat, the massive growth of the mobile market as a whole is going to push the mobile internet users beyond the PC users within the next year or so. Even if you took the worst case scenario - PC growth booms, mobile growth softens etc., before the end of the decade, we'll at least have parity.
So you can see that it's really not a matter of if the mobile phone will become the dominant internet platform any more, but when. And that when isn't expressed in "somedays" either, I bet if you wanted to sit down with the numbers you could probably pick out the exact day. I'm thinking it'll probably be around October 3rd, 2007 (at 8:34 a.m).
:-)
-Russ