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Comment by patkai | Hacker News Reader

I'm also skeptical of reports where one seems to need 294 slides to identify a trend. But drowning viewers in data and having no conclusions at the end is all the data I need.

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>need 294 slides to identify a trend.

Her report isn't trying to identify "a trend" (singular). They are slides for multiple trends (plural). Notice that "trends" is the actual title of the report.

There isn't meant to be only one single narrative for all the slides. (Well, the "internet" is a common denominator but "internet" is obviously already in the title.)

E.g. the slides for voice assistants trends (Amazon echo) are separate from housing space utilization trends (AirBnb). Multiple trends for different technologies, different business sectors, different geographies, etc.

The report has value to find trends or insights that may apply to a particular world, specifically when trying to get a sense of disruption.

True. What I don’t get though: Why is it sooo popular then?

It's popular because it's a convenient compendium of a bunch of charts.

Let's say I'm wondering about "number of smartphone users growth". A google search might pull one chart for that.[1]

What Mary Meeker does is ask 200 of those types of questions, gathers all the data to make the charts, and puts them together in one deck. That's more convenient than conducting 200 searches on the Statista website.

I think the disconnect and dissatisfaction happens because they expect Mary Meeker's slides to provide some mind-blowing insight. I think it's more realistic just to accept it as a nice data dump of some of the latest trends.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartph...

Thank you for this explanation. Makes completely sense

Not expecting mind blowing insight, just insight. Data turned into knowledge and models, showing relationships and significance. Gathering data is an intermediate step in this process. But true, it is a nice dump of data!

It helps to have an alliterative name. ;-) Only half joking. The executive types who like this kind of thing also have a tendency to think alliteration makes them sound smarter.

Mary Meeker became popular about seven or eight years ago, and at the time, there was an executive summary: "mobile is much, much bigger than you realize."

At the time, many people didn't realize that Android + iOS shipments had dwarfed Wintel shipments until they saw this dramatic image in her 2012 slide deck. https://image.slidesharecdn.com/internettrendsstanford120312...

Since then, IMO, people keep showing up because they're looking for another major shock. But there hasn't been a major shock like the rise of mobile since then. Mobile is still big. China is still big. etc.

Now her presentations convey a feeling of comfort. "I believed all of this already, because I am a smart, well-informed person, and here's the data to prove it."

Mary Meeker became popular in 1995. She was the lead internet equity research analyst at Morgan Stanley and covered the IPO of Netscape. She was one of the top equity research analysts in 1998-2000 covering EBay, Amazon, Drugstore.com amongst others

I think the alliteration in her name and the fact that it's an annual report ("Oh yeah, I read this last year") contribute too.

Speaking for myself: Because it's a collection of lots or relevant data in one place. You get to pop up your head and look at the world at large. How is the industry as a whole progressing, what particular areas are "hot" in terms of attention.

It's well researched, it's sourced, it's free - quite likely the only compendium of that size that meets those criteria.

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