With tablet and smart-phone shipments eclipsing PC and laptop shipments -- and with new mobile broadband connections far exceeding the number of new fixed broadband connections -- it's clear that a tipping point in thie history of the internet has been reached. Which means that now may be as good a time as any to ask yourself: Are you well-positioned to leverage the Mobile Internet?
Former Morgan Stanley research analyst Mary Meeker (now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) recently gave a state of the Mobile Internet presentation at Google. Slides from that presentation can be seen here:
The slideshow is full of mindblowing numbers, charts, and observations. Some of the leading takeaways:
- Mobile Internet data traffic is expected to grow by 26X over next 5 years
- Mobile Internet devices are expected to reach 10X the billion-or-so devices on today’s Desktop Internet
- The Mobile Internet is growing much faster than the Desktop Internet did
- The Mobile Internet will be a much bigger phenomenon than most people think
- One of the big growth drivers is the Tablet
The last point is worth emphasizing. Did you know that in its first 3 months, Apple's iPad outsold the iPod and iPhone (combined) by a factor of 3.5? Or that Gartner is predicting that by 2013, there will be as many tablets in use in the enterprise as there are PCs?
The fact is, we have entered a world in which realtime 24/7 broadband connectivity in the palm of one's hand is the new baseline.
This means that the majority of software interactions will (from this point forward) be occurring on handheld devices. If you're not poised to take advantage of this, you will soon be in a small (and diminishing) minority.
That's why Adobe Dreamweaver, Flash Builder, and CQ5 offer crossplatform mobile development and deployment options. And it's why you'll want to take an especially close look at the new release of the Adobe Enterprise Platform when it arrives soon. To take full advantage of Mobile, you need world-class design tools and runtime infrastructure that were created with Mobile in mind. Anything less is (or should be) unacceptable -- unless you're planning to live in the past.