Mary Meeker Says We're Giving Up Our Possessions for the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Mary Meeker Says We're Giving Up Our Possessions for the Internet

wired.com

30 pointsiProject26 comments

"...the move from an asset-heavy lifestyle to an asset-light existence"

I often wondered how much of an impact the digital marketplace was having on the consumption of physical things. Unfortunately it seems to be minuscule.

The top industries in terms of sales and profits are still far and away dominated by companies that sell physical things. Companies like Walmart, ExxonMobil, Intel and Apple. There are exceptions such as Microsoft. But software sales tend to be tied to the sale of devices which become redundant faster and faster.

I would argue that we are acquiring more possessions as we continuously seek better ways to enjoy the internet and digital stuff(games, music etc). Apple is a case in point; Sales of iPad's and iPhones continue to grow.

Compare an iPad to the 10 cubic feet of games and 10 chic feet of books it replaces.

Compare your TF2 hat collection to a real closet full of hats.

Compare your blog/myspace background to your front lawn.

Your anecdote doesn't escape the fact that we are consuming more and more physical things (re-read the OP).

Also, real books don't have a 12 month upgrade cycle.

Are people really upgrading their Kindle or Nook every 12 months?

Sales growth would suggest a lot of people are, or at least purchasing another device. iPad, Kindle and Nook sales are all up.

I buy every new Kindle that comes out; same with my phones and most of my other devices. But I'm far and away an outlier, even within gadget geek circles. New customers are who drive the sales numbers, by and large, not people like me.

Neither do ebooks.

"Compare an iPad..."

I don't know either, but the sharing aspect, in other words the effective use rate of physical goods, that that is going up, can only be a good thing. Optimization of utilization, I think, is good. It means that people don't necessarily have to own a whole item, but a fraction of one. That lessens impact on the environment and also allows us to dedicate resources to other things we find important.

Of course, it's not a perfect model, as evidenced by 'time share' vacation homes (i.e. there are peak demand times) but it gets better use out of things than otherwise.

Meeker says we have the biggest peacetime discrepancy between government expenses and income in US history - except that this isn't peacetime; we've got active war going on in two active theaters. (For such a long time, apparently, that Wired has forgotten it entirely.)

So why should I believe anything else she has to say?

Because if we aren't nice to her she wont tell us why lower physical footprint per person is something negative rather than essential if asia is copying US lifestyle.

Technically, these military activities are "authorized military engagements" and not outright declarations of war (which has not happened since WWII).

I'm sure that makes them much cheaper. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

All the more reason that we need stricter controls over what law enforcement can do. E.g. my Dropbox data is still my data, even if I don't own the server that it resides on.

I see what the objection is, but I think that this is a good thing on the whole.

Possessions are not sustainable. There is only so far an economy can grow before we use all of the metal and oil and landfill space available. The only way we can continue to grow at 3% a year is to spend less on possessions and more on experiences and ideas (to include digital media/software).

I agree. As long as growth is tied to manufacturing of physical stuff, we're fucked. Unfortunately with an expanding middle class internationally, I don't see this problem going away in a hurry.

It's been a long time that you do not pay much anymore for physical things but rather for things like service. The US is a service-heavy industry like most developed countries. And regarding resources, we are barely scratching the surface of the Earth currently, and techniques to get resources deeper or in farther places will keep improving. I am not worried.

I'm more concerned with the global environmental consequences of extracting those resources.

Mary Meeker? Srsly? Wasn't her 15 mins up long ago?

Just how wrong do your predictions have to be before the media will stop calling you for quotes? (Dick "Lehman won't go down" Bove indicates pretty much forever. Journalists must really not bother with checking history.)

Could you elaborate on which of her predictions were wrong?

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/...

She's often considered the face of the irrational exuberance behind the first dot com boom/bubble.

Rating many companies that subsequently lose 90-100% of their market cap as 'strong buys' is a pretty scary track record. IIRC, her portfolio of 'outperforms-or-better' lost ~80% of their value in one year.

Granted that the 'market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent', etc so she may not deserve all the scorn heaped on her (I haven't done the research to know ...)

To add to smanek's reply: Meeker was part of Morgan Stanley during a period of heavy conflict of interest. MS did not separate the function of investment banking from research, so you can imagine why her investment ratings on no-profit internet stocks were quite high. (Henry Blodget got caught (the infamous "POS memo"), it is unclear how much farther Eliot Spitzer would have gotten if he hadn't been caught with his pants down.) She eventually admitted that she did not author investment reports with her name on it, so who knows if the article above is actually based on her words or not.

Whether it's true or not about people "giving up possessions for the internet" is immaterial. The takeaway with Mary should be: A shyster of a saleswoman is trying to sell you something.

Recently, I have been thinking that "online" is increasingly becoming the third place. One which smartphones enable to largely penetrate the other two by enabling us to take entire communities with us wherever we go.

The move toward using real names online may be accelerating the trend by more closely tying our online activities to our identities at home and work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_third_place

Connectedness, globalization and the number of books, movies, music, that we publish today is amazing; it's an impossible task to build a personal library like it might have looked like you could in the 70s or 80s

Personal library as in a personal collection of all/most media?

Someone read Rainbows End

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