I came across an interesting presentation the other day that reminded me how significant the impact mobile devices, and especially the iPhone, are having on the technology marketplace. Chi-Hau Chien, a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers $100 million iFund, gave a presentation at iPhoneDevCamp 3 entitled The Power of the AppStore and its Future Opportunities. The full presentation is embedded below.
In 14 simple slides, Chi-Hua re-iterates what the scale of mobile technology’s impact has been on the market in the past 5 years. Consider the following slides I’ve excerpted from the presentation:
Basically, there are four times as many mobile phone users today as there are Internet users.
The AppStore has shown even greater growth.
I’ll couple these observations with an anecdote from my own house. A couple of months ago, my oldest brother stopped by for a visit. While he was here he was talking about the need to get a new cell phone. Two of my daughters, aged 11 and 10 at the time, went and got their cell phones and were showing my brother all of the cool things you could do with the new basic phones that were available today. I thought back to the first ‘bag phone’ I had in 1985 and marveled at how much technology had changed and the fact that a couple of pre-teens were at the cutting edge. This is not a new revelation – it’s been repeated millions of times in households all across the globe in the past 5 years.
I am basically a historian by training and when I look at the enterprise software market I think about the big transitions that have occurred in the past 30 years like the advent of the PC in the early 1980s, relational databases in the mid-80s, client-server computing in the 1990s, and the Internet in the early years of this century. Each of these technology waves spawned a huge set of market opportunities that have fueled the growth of the biggest software companies in the marketplace today – IBM, Google, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, etc. Chi-Hua’s presentation helped me to put in perspective what I’ve known about mobile technology for a long time. While social media technologies are somewhat the darling of the technology marketplace today, it’s clear to me that the next great generation of large technology.
Here’s Chi-Hua’s full presentation:
