Thursday, January 14, 2010

57 million iPhones worldwide = lots of 50-plus users

Those of you who can remember the heady days of the dot.com era will know the name of Mary Meeker. She was guru, par excellence, about all things digital. Well she is still at it and has recently directed a study about the Mobile Internet for Morgan Stanley (Dec 15, 2009). She studied the rate of change spurred by the iPhone and all of the technologies and services it has spawned.  Here is just one of her observations.

It took Apple 2 years and 3 months to reach 57 million users, compared to 5 years for Docomo to reach 40M, Netscape 4 years to reach 50M. The trajectory for Apple is very steep at this time. Smartphone, in aggregate, will grow from 288M in 2008 to over 1B units by 2013.

You can read more about this report on the MotherApp blog.

Two months ago, BusinessWeek called it the “App Economy”. Prediction is that there will be 300,000 apps on the Apple App Store in a year.

My friends and colleagues seem amazed that I am so excited about the potential of mobile apps. Hopefully these factlets help explain the reason.

Anybody who thinks this has nothing to do with marketing to the older consumer is crazy! Dick Stroud

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