"Apple has a two or three-year lead" in mobile internet domination
Philip Elmer-DeWitt has an excellent article over at Fortune's Apple 2.0 blog on Morgan Stanley's The Mobile Internet seminar. The article is full of juicy tidbits, but here is the main course:
Based on past performance, according to Morgan Stanley, Apple is in the "pole position" in the race to dominate mobile Internet computing, which is supposed to be for the 2000s what desktop Internet computing was for the 1990s, personal computing for the 1980s, mini computing for the 1970s, and mainframe computing for the 1960s.
"Apple has a two or three-year lead" according to Katy Huberty, thanks to an installed base of 57 million handsets, 100,000 apps and 200 million iTunes subscribers with credit card numbers on file.
Another interesting tidbit that DeWitt spotlights is a diagram that compares Facebook's 350,000 apps and 137% year-over-year growth with the iPhone's 100,000 apps and 163% growth. As DeWitt points out, "The place where Mark Zuckerberg's 430 million users overlap with Steve Jobs' 57 million is the sweet spot of the mobile Internet. It's here, according to Morgan Stanley, where we find the future of computing."
Be sure to check out DeWitt's article, as it's a great read, but if you want to delve deeper, you can check out the 92 slides of the Morgan Stanley presentation, the 659-slide "key themes" presentation, and the massive 424-page Mobile Internet Report, all in PDF format.
