Quick thoughts on the Crystal ball by Mary Meeker

Nitin T Bhat
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

Mary Meeker shared her deep insights on variety of topics including Internet user trends, advertising, gaming, cloud, health and many more. If you are a PM or a technologist, I would strongly recommend reading it.

These thoughts below don’t reflect of my present or previous employers.This data should be used for informational purposes.

1) On the global Internet user trend, this number will touch 5 billion users in next 5–7 years. The kind of initiatives which are being run by companies like Google and Facebook for improving connectivity like Internet.org will help accelerate this trend. Also, the telecom providers in developing countries are spending a lot on the core infrastructure for voice and data backbone. Net neutrality will continue to be a concern among the users though.

2) The smartphone shipment will continue to increase and it will primarily be powered by growth in the BRICS plus Mexico, Turkey and Nigeria.

3) Online advertising-Google, Facebook will continue to dominate this industry. There would be consolidation in this industry overall. Many players offering similar services for ad exchanges, ad bidding. Mobile will continue to be the key, but as experiences move from mobiles to wearable devices like Hololens, Google Glass++ it would be interesting to see how advertising evolves itself to be part of seamless experience when customer is immersed in that experience.

Amazon would be a formidable player in the advertising space in the near future. Even though Google and Facebook have lot of instrumentation about the customers, the buying decisions are happening in the Amazon real estate.

  • Image and voice based recognition back ends will power context advertising. This will powered by deep investment in AI and inference of knowledge from raw data running into exabytes of data.
  • Hyper local e-commerce which is super successful in India and with Amazon Prime Now will be replicated across the world.

4) Media- Again Netflix would be the outlier. But the new set of challengers including Amazon video, Hulu, Youtube will increase their numbers over traditional TV based networks. The experience of viewing will move from broadcast+cable to streaming.

Its also likely a content providers amalgamates music streaming along with movie or TV streaming. Customer would like to have the option to stream from a single service content independent of type of content including music, movies, TV series. This will help increase average revenue per user (ARPU).

Facebook will continue to work on partnership with content providers like BuzzFeed to increase % of user engagement with their video platform.

5) Cloud- Report hits the bulls eye in this section.

  • Cloud adoption will accelerate rapidly in next 5 years. The primary drivers of growth would be financial and health care sector who are seeing the advantages of scale, low cost, security with either private or public cloud offering.

Transport would be a sector which will help in cloud story with companies like Uber, Convoy, getting into the autonomous vehicle drive system, with only cloud having the scale to process the data in real time.

  • The customer expectation will increase in the user experience and software modelling/visualization for both sectors — enterprise and consumer. This would help products like PowerBI, Tableau
  • Compliance would become super critical. Security will continue to be a paramount importance.
  • Lock in concerns would help the top 3–4 cloud providers to increase their customer base. The value added services and managed services market would increase whether its managing Virtual machines or container infrastructure.

6) China and India predictions- Payments gateways like Alipay, WeChatPay, PayTM would integrate into the mobile wallet and challenge the paper currency as the defacto standard of payment. The rise of China OEMs in India is spectacular specifically Xiaomi. They have a great GLOCAL story.

7) Tremendous infrastructure being created in India for growing the GDP at a consistent rate of 6% for next 5–10 years. Impetus to Digital India, demonetization and improving banking for the lower income groups will form the basis of this infrastructure. This is being built on top of a program for identification called Aadhar.

Cross posted at LinkedIn here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quick-thoughts-crystal-ball-mary-meeker-nitin-t-bhat

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Nitin T Bhat

Written by

Work at Azure, previously at AWS. Playing squash, beginning to like running half marathons

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