Mary Meeker: Mobile Internet Will Soon Overtake Fixed Internet

Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley isn’t just any Internet analyst. She was covering the sector when the brokerage firm was the lead underwriter for Netscape Communications’ initial public offering in 1995, was dubbed the “Queen of the Net” by Barron’s magazine in 1998 and was covering the space in 2004, when Morgan Stanley helped launch the Google IPO. Now a managing director at Morgan Stanley and head of the global technology research team, she has released her latest massively detailed “State of the Internet” report, which she has been putting out periodically since 1995. She presented the report during an event this afternoon at Google, which was streamed live as part of the Events@Google series.

And what does Meeker see in her crystal ball this year? Two overwhelming trends that will affect consumers, the hardware/infrastructure industry and the commercial potential of the web: mobile and social networking. Such a conclusion is hardly earth-shattering news to GigaOM readers, for we have been following these trends over the past year or two, but Meeker puts some pretty large numbers next to those trends, and looks at the shifts that will (or are likely to) take place in related industries such as communications hardware. She also compares where the rest of the developed world is in terms of mobile communications and social networking with Japan. Again, not a radically different approach to the one many tech forecasters take, but Meeker has the weight of some considerable research chops on her side. See her full presentation here