The year 2002 was a turning-point for the telephone, invented 126 years earlier. For the first time, the number of mobile phones overtook the number of fixed-line ones, making the telephone a predominantly mobile technology.
During 2013 the same thing will happen to the internet, just 44 years after its ancestor, ARPANET, was first switched on. The number of internet-connected mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers, will exceed the number of desktop and laptop personal computers (PCs) in use, according to figures from Morgan Stanley (see chart above)
IDATE, a consultancy, says that the number of people accessing the internet via mobile devices will overtake the number using fixed-line connections in mid-2014.
That does not mean that mobile devices will displace PCs altogether. The rise of mobile phones, after all, did not mean that fixed-line phones stopped working, even if their number is now in decline. Yet the centre of gravity of the internet will shift as mobile devices are more popular and more capable,
All this will have far-reaching consequences for technology companies, which are being divided into winners and losers by the growing significance of mobile devices.
The biggest winner in all this, without question, is Apple. Its iPad dominates the fast-growing market for tablet computers, and its iPhone accounts for nearly three-quarters of the profits of the mobile-phone industry, despite accounting for less than 10% of global handset sales.
The biggest losers are also obvious: the giants of the PC era such as Dell, HP and Microsoft; mobile-device makers such as Nokia and RIM, which were too slow to put the internet at the heart of their products; and games-console makers such as Sony and Nintendo, which are suffering as gaming goes mobile too.
Most companies, however, are somewhere in the middle. The question now is how easily they can shift their business models towards mobile.
Twitter is well on its way: a majority of users of its microblogging service already use it from mobile devices. Amazon, eBay and other online retailers are also well placed, since a mobile device means you can shop from anywhere.
The biggest question marks hang over Facebook and Google. Both rely on online advertising for the bulk of their revenues. The problem is that advertising rates are much lower on mobile devices than on the desktop web. As a result, the amount of ad revenue a website makes from a mobile user is only about 20% of what it makes from a desktop user.
The rise of the mobile internet will reshape the technology industry and will also transform the way people use and perceive the internet. Mobile telephony meant that instead of calling a place you could call a person. Similarly, the internet - which used to be seen as a separate place accessed through a PC screen - is fast becoming an extra layer of reality, accessed by a device that is always with you. In the coming years that will be the most profound change of all.
from The Economist
