On April 12, 2010, Morgan Stanley did a presentation giving an overview of what they thought coming Internet trends would be. Their presentation slides can be seen at: http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs/Internet_Trends...
...but here's some of interest:
- 5 countries account for 48% of all Internet users:
- Morgan Stanley predicts that, given growth trends, within 5 years, the total number of mobile internet users (smartphones, iPod Touch, iPad, etc..) will surpass the total number of desktop Internet users (although these numbers are not mutually exclusive)
- while both the number of email users and social networking users are growing very rapidly, there are now more social networking users and they spend waaaaaaaaaaaaay more time social networking than email users spend emailing:
- the adoption of the "mobile Internet" (again "smartphone", iPod Touch, iPad accesses to the Internet) far outstrips the adoption of other internet phenomena as defined by: AOL, Netscape browser, Japan's NTT DoCoMo internet service "i-mode" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode). Also, Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch is leading the way in the "mobile Internet" market. This sees the iPhone/iPod Touch growth, in 11 months, to be about 11x what AOL saw in the same period; almost 5x the adoption of "Netscape"/browser use; and about two and a half times the growth of Japan's successful "i-mode" phone-based Internet services.
Morgan Stanley concludes that this rapid adoption is due to 5 converging trends: "Mobile Ramping Faster than Desktop Internet Did and Will Be Bigger Than Most Think – 5 Trends Converging (3G + Social Networking + Video + VoIP + Impressive Mobile Devices)".
- Facebook and Youtube have been the biggest gainers in terms of getting "internet eyeballs" over the past 3 years. MSN and Yahoo saw the largest declines:
- Facebook is the most downloaded free app for the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch: