Mary Meeker's 2014 Internet Trends | Hacker News Reader

Mary Meeker's 2014 Internet Trends

kpcb.com

202 pointsrkudeshi46 comments

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TLDR:

1. Still more runway for smartphone usage - 30% mobile penetration

2. Tablets growing with plenty of penetration opportunity - 400M+ tablets vs. 800M Laptops and 1.6B smartphones

3. Mobile internet install base will be 10x desktop install base

4. More mobile, more security problems

5. Things aren't so bubbly when compared to 2000

6. Youtube is teaching your kids and that's a good thing (my words)

7. Healthcare will hopefully get better with technology

8. People love chat apps and sharing videos + pics

9. Apps are unbundling: "There's an app for that..."

10. Turn all your content into lists and you will strike social distribution gold (my words)

11. Apps will save you time, money, find your next love, and do everything else for you same day by removing the friction of human interaction.

12. Any bitcoin based chart looks like a hockey stick (my words)

13. Big data slides - real time, sensors, cloud, data mining

14. Hardware costs down, cloud usage up

15. Online video is big and will be on your TV too

16. China

17. Drones

Once again, awesome analysis. Highlights for me

- great breakdown of timespent/adspend per medium showing huge potential for ads on mobile and overspend on print

- the tablet/phone boundary is being stretched by Korea with very low 'tablet' use but high phablet use

- clear age division on transition to online on-demand TV

- music switching to subscription with collapse of pay per track

- video consumption grows and grows on mobile

Tablet growth still booming, while iPad growth has slowed considerably and is causing analysts to rethink importance of iPad/tablets.

Slide 96 helps tell the story - cheap generic tablets market in underdeveloped countries as tv supplement/replacements.

Also interesting: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/4/25/ipad-growth

iPad growth has slowed as it was originally designed as a high end device, so most people who would buy one have bought theirs (same with those replacing computers with them). It's hard to justify spending the money on something that only offers a slight portability upgrade on a MacBook Air unless you do something with it unique, like read comics.

The interesting piece is overall tablet use growing, as the non-iPad options continue to improve and offer a cheap alternative for doing things like going to a coffee shop or browsing on CalTrain.

'Ain't bout what you walk away from, it's bout what you walk away with.' -Lil Wayne

I'd summarize the end of this report (which for me is the best part with):

a) it doesn't matter if you're first-generation or second-generation as a founder b) if your app or site or service can participate in China, you have 10x booster thrusters.

The China piece is a big insight. Huge population! I think the overseas strength is what made WeChat so valuable.

I figured this might appear on hacker news soon enough. If anyone has any questions about the tech behind this microsite (although it is pretty straightforward) let me know. We developed the site and the hosting to account for an enormous amount of traffic in a very short period of time. So far everything is working fine.

when I tried to view using firefox, the cpu bar kept high eating all the memory and unresponsive. I saw in firebug net tab that every slide was being fetch from slideshare in a loop. Does not happen in chrome.

Thanks. We had another report of that too, unfortunately we do not have much control over the slideshare embed, but we are working with them on it.

I think it's a SlideShare issue unrelated to this site. On my system, SlideShare bumps the CPU usage up to 50% or more in both Firefox and Chrome.

I can confirm that Slideshare is eating all CPU, maybe use Speaker Deck: https://speakerdeck.com/

Or start using HTML for slides. like with text and stuff, not images.

Very poor usability on chrome osx. Clicking next takes 2-3 seconds before the next slide shows...

The slideshare embed is having some issues. We added a link to download the PDF directly until slideshare works that out.

Such poor design for mobile. Almost unusable on a nexus 4. Ironic given the emphasis mobile gets in the presentation.

I'm interested to hear the feedback. We did the design for the site and tested it extensively on mobile. What issue are you seeing? My email is in my profile if you want to drop me a line.

edit: The slideshare embed is having some issues on mobile and desktop unfortunately. Very slow. They are working on it.

It was unviewable due to the slowness. Just linking to the PDF on a static webserver somewhere would have been far superior.

We added a link to the pdf beneath the slidedeck. We should have considered doing that in the first place - hindsight is 20/20.

It's listed above but here it is again: http://www.kpcb.com/file/kpcb-internet-trends-2014

From Slide 9: mobile usage as a % of web usage is now 25%. It was 14% last year.

This seems contrary to what we hear about native apps dominating smartphone usage. Obviously that web usage isn't "HTML5 Apps" per se and I'm sure apps dominate services like Facebook, Yelp, etc ... but that number and growth seems very significant.

I think everybody's stats are getting thrown out by the tendency of iOS browsers (at least) to refresh page just about every time app or tab focus changes.

I suspect that's unlikely - most analytics are focused on time-based sessions, where refreshes don't matter.

Embedded browsers within native apps likely add serious growth for web usage. E.g. Facebook native app is hugely popular, and sends a lot of traffic to a lot of websites within the app's browser.

It doesn't seem like that necessarily conflicts with native apps dominating smartphone usage - there's a significant number of use cases where a user wouldn't use an app, such as reading news articles linked from an app like Feedly. Mobile use is growing fast enough (and desktop is flat to shrinking) that a doubling of web usage may just represent the overall shift in usage patterns (i.e. desktop consumption of web moving to mobile.)

Slide 16 supports the apps over native story: app revenue is dominating browser advertising on an increasing basis.

An open question - is Mary Meeker still taken as seriously as she was 15 years ago? I don't talk to enough people in the investor community to know either way.

This slide deck is a notable annual event.

Mary and others like Steve Milunovich at Morgan Stanley were in a rather unique place and time 15 years ago because the Internet was just becoming this very-important-thing and very few people really understood it. Today's a lot different. That said, this presentation is widely viewed as pretty important annual snapshot of certain trends. Note though that Mary is at KPCB [Edit: Corrected] these days so her focus is presumably a bit different than when she was employed in financial services.

I think you mean KPCB, or else she still would be in financial services of a sort.

Duh. You're right of course. Corrected.

Very impressive and helpful data/charts in the KPCB report. That being said, there is a saying on Wall St that if an economist (or anyone) could predict future, she wouldn't need any employment. One usually gets wiser as she ages, but I don't think predicting future is easier than 15 years ago.

At MS she was in the business of hyping their tech equities. What's her role now? Creating hype around the KPCB brand? I assume she's not an active investor.

Was Meeker ever taken seriously? Her predictions were so bad that they got her and Morgan Stanley sued.

They got sued for pumping and dumping tech stocks. Andy Kessler's writings make both Mary Meeker and Henry Blodget sound like really shady characters. He made Meeker sound a bit thick.

If this is called "analysis" then there is no hope.

Indeed. In fact it's just a tad below what passes for state-of-art proprietary "analysis" for clients in that industry. You'll never, ever see error bars in those graphs, for instance; nor any non-hand-waving rationale for the implicit fungibility assumptions behind most (if not all) of their claims about "potential" ---like the notorious "~$30+ bn mobile market opportunity / print is overspent" one in slide 15, which blithely assumes that the value of user engagement with ads per unit of time spent ought to be the same regardless of the medium: be it a tiny smartphone screen in the middle of a stressful subway commute, or a full-page glossy magazine ad with enclosed perfume sample on a weekend evening.

Apart from the satiric element of such analytic uselessness though, I like these reports for what they reveal about the industry's collective anxieties and fixations ---tablet tablet tablet, social social social, ads ads ads, data data data, china china china. Cf for instance, in slide 90, this eye-opening jewel:

Biggest Re-Imagination of All = People Enabled With Mobile Devices + Sensors Uploading Troves of Findable & Sharable Data

If that is their "biggest re-imagination of all", then as you say there is no hope, indeed.

not a word about soundcloud, one of the fastest growing trends in 2014

Original PDF: http://s3.amazonaws.com/kpcbweb/files/85/Internet_Trends_201...

thanks. slideshare was so slow. try to download it from slide share and hit a register wall. sometimes trying to make things fancy makes things worse. great content non the less :)

I recommend this url instead. It will redirect to the PDF file and will always redirect to the most up to date version:

http://www.kpcb.com/file/kpcb-internet-trends-2014

Alright, we'll change the url to that. Previous url: http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends.

Sorry, silly question, what's "y/y" that keeps appearing in this report?

year over year comparison

The ‘Made in USA’ slide (10) is nonsense. It shows a shift from non-USA OSes, Symbian and Linux to 'Made in USA' OSes, Android, iOS and Windows phone. But Android is built on Linux!

"USA controlled" may be a better way of putting it.

Android has a Linux kernel, but most of the OS is not what you'd find on a normal Linux desktop distro. It was started by Android, Inc. in California and is now developed almost entirely by Google.

HN is going downhill because more and more users down-vote comments not because they are fallacious or illogical, but because don't like them.

sp332's comment is fair, as far as I know, but so is mine. Android is a Linux distribution according to the Linux Foundation, Google's open-source chief Chris DiBona, and several journalists.[1] "We assess the initial effort needed to adapt the Linux kernel into Android and found that 99% of the function-alities of Linux kernel 2.6 were reused into Android, and only 0.7% of the reused files were modified to implement the requirements of Android."[2]

I said the slide is "nonsense" because it is inconsistent in how it counts Linux-based OSes.

[1] Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)

[2] Adapting Linux for Mobile Platforms: An Empirical Study of Android. http://swat.polymtl.ca/~foutsekh/docs/era-khomh-foutse-adapt...

It's a nit perhaps but being as this is technical stuff I'd prefer the standard SI prefixes rather than MM and the like used in some beancounting.

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