Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Analyst Angle. We’ve collected a group of the industry’s leading analysts to give their outlook on the hot topics in the wireless industry.
I’m sure the first reaction to this week’s column title caught your attention. You might even have asked: “Is this guy losing it or what?” While my family figured that out a long time ago, there’s a very important message in the title, but it needs some explanation.
The fact that the web no longer matters seems counterintuitive. The World Wide Web (which gives us the front portion of the name of most websites – “www”) has become the center of the digital universe. Every organization and many individual people have built or will build websites, and that’s certainly going to continue for many years.
Why the web no longer matters is that more and more of us (and millions of machines that communicate as well) won’t ever directly access the web any longer. Instead, we’ll access something else that provides us with the information we want – and that intermediary will access the old, traditional web. Others are coming to the same conclusion.
One analogy to this situation might be nuclear power generation: no one really touches the power generator’s core. Instead, we touch the heat and power that is generated. The core is still built, but we really don’t witness or see it.
Let me show you why accessing the web will very soon no longer matter. This is primarily due to mobility: mobile phones never touch the web directly. All mobile phones with web access go through a mobile server that, in turn, actually interacts with the web. Web pages are realigned, mobile ads are inserted, video is encoded differently, and lots of processing is done to make the mobile web experience acceptable.
Let’s try to put this in perspective. In many areas of the world outside the United States, the mobile phone is the only way to access information. People in these areas don’t have broadband access at home. Thus, their mobile phone becomes their ‘”life line” to getting information. There are around 6 billion people in the world, and 60% (3.6 billion) currently own a mobile phone. Less than a third of these people have broadband.
In addition, smart phone applications are becoming the primary information interface to mobile users. The apps may access the Internet or the mobile web server, but the user doesn’t access the web directly.
As tablets become more common for everyone, people are going to use more publishing applications to read content from newspapers and magazines, as well as listen to music that comes from servers like Pandora. Thus, direct web access will take a much smaller percentage of everyone’s time.
Other reasons that direct web access no longer matters pertain to the interfaces, interpreters and mash-ups. Interfaces provide a local app on a personal computer, and the user experiences something beneficial. The app may communicate with the web, but the user doesn’t. Some examples include DropBox, which enables file sharing among groups of people – you put your file in the folder locally and it’s stored on the web.
Multi-person games run in a similar manner. You play the game using a local application that gives you a rich graphical experience, and the application connects the other users over the web that you don’t see. Mash-ups take content from many different places and present a unified set of information.
And finally, another major reason that direct web access doesn’t matter – people are spending less time “on the web.” There are more choices available to people and, thus they spend less and less of their time inside the web browser. More time is spent on e-mail, posting to Facebook with the phone, playing games and reading material in digital publishing applications.
Sure, direct web access is still important today; however, it is becoming less important all the time. There’s a movement to put more apps “in the cloud” but people are not always online, and it’s my belief that local access (personal computer, tablet and smart phone) provides the best user experience. The local app can access more resources on the web (cloud) to make my local experience better.
I think from this analysis you can see that my title is appropriate: The time spent directly accessing the web no longer matters. What does matter is getting the job done, enjoying the game, or efficiently (and locally) reading the material that’s important to you.
J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D. is Principal Analyst, Mobile & Wireless, MobileTrax L.L.C. As a nationally recognized industry authority, he focuses on monitoring and analyzing emerging trends, technologies and market behavior in the mobile computing and wireless data communications industry in North America. Dr. Purdy is an ‘edge of network’ analyst looking at devices, applications and services as well as wireless connectivity to those devices.
Dr. Purdy provides critical insights regarding mobile and wireless devices, wireless data communications and connection to the infrastructure that powers the data in the wireless handheld. He is author of the column Inside Mobile & Wireless that provides industry insights and is read by over 100,000 people a month.
Dr. Purdy continues to be affiliated with the venture capital industry as well. He currently is Managing Director, Yosemite Ventures. And, he spent five years as a Venture Advisor for Diamondhead Ventures in Menlo Park where he identified, attracted and recommended investments in emerging companies in the mobile and wireless. He has had a prior affiliation with East Peak Advisors and, subsequently, following their acquisition, with FBR Capital Markets.
For more than 16 years, Dr. Purdy has been consulting, speaking, researching, networking, writing and developing state-of-the-art concepts that challenge people’s mind-sets and developing new ways of thinking and forecasting in the mobile computing and wireless data arenas. Often quoted, his ideas and opinions are followed closely by thought leaders in the mobile & wireless industry. He is author of three books.
Dr. Purdy currently is a member of the Program Advisory Board of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) that produces CES, one of the largest trade shows in the world. He is a frequent moderator at CTIA conferences and GSM Mobile World Congress. He also is a member of the Board of the Atlanta Wireless Technology Forum.
