My dog Rhody, an Australian Shepherd, turned 15 a few weeks ago. He’s a living refutation of the old myth that dogs age as much in one year as humans do in seven. By that formula he’d be acting like a doddering 105-year-old, but if you met him you’d agree that he doesn’t seem a day over 70. (Because different breeds have different lifespans, it’s technically impossible to pin down the length of a “dog year.” There are two recorded cases of dogs living to the age of 29.)
But there’s another sense in which Rhody’s age is really showing. From a technological point of view, the year 1997, when he was whelped, now seems to belong to an impossibly distant past. Think about it: In 1997 there were only about 200 million people with mobile phones in the entire world. Now there are more than 5 billion. Back then, even a low-end digital camera cost $600 or more, which is why all my puppy pictures are prints; now there’s a multi-megapixel camera in every smartphone. In 1997, there was no Wi-Fi and no consumer GPS. Nobody had a DVR, a 2-gigabyte hard drive was huge, and we didn’t know we needed a TSA or a DHS.
Not that Rhody pays attention to such things. I’m just saying that there’s been enough change over the course of his short doggy existence to fill up an entire human lifetime. In a sense, we’re all living in dog years now, at least when it comes to realms touched by information technology. It should be no surprise that legal, social, and economic institutions can’t always keep up. And we should probably be bracing for even faster change—and more chaos—over the next 15 years, as several huge trends with unstoppable momentum play themselves out.
It was reading Mary Meeker’s latest mega-slide-deck, delivered at this week’s All Things Digital conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA, that got me thinking along these lines. The former Morgan Stanley analyst, who now works at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is famous for her annual overviews of the state of the Internet and the risks and opportunities facing technology entrepreneurs and investors. In this year’s deck, Meeker devotes 59 of her 112 slides to what she calls “the re-imagination of nearly everything—powered by new devices + connectivity + UI + beauty.”
Using stark “then” and “now” imagery, Meeker reminds us how quickly things have changed in areas like computing, telephony, transportation, manufacturing, commerce, business, healthcare, education, gaming, media (including newspapers, magazines, books, music, photography, video, and sound recording) and everyday life (diaries, note taking, scrapbooks, coupons). Rarely does she have to reach more than five or 10 years into the past for a “then” image that looks positively antique. A first-generation Xbox controller seems pretty clunky next to the Kinect, for example; the Yellow Pages pales next to Yelp.
By themselves, none of Meeker’s observations are unfamiliar or surprising. It’s the sheer number of examples that reminds you how broad and far-reaching the changes have been. And in this game, we haven’t even reached the early innings—to quote Meeker, “We are still in spring training,” meaning that the next 15 years could be even more tumultuous than the last 15.
Why? Well, here’s just one indicator: 6. That’s the percentage of the population with 3G data access in China. In India, it’s even lower: 4 percent. But these also happen to be the countries where 3G access is spreading fastest (Vietnam, Brazil, Turkey, and Egypt are also adding 3G subscribers quickly). Globally, 3G penetration is at only 18 percent. In other words, there are still a few billion people waiting to be admitted to the high-speed wireless economy, with its apps, music, video, maps, news, photos, games, and all the rest.
Not only will these people bring enormous amounts of cash and attention into the system, but each group will have unique needs and interests, creating nearly unending room for product innovation and business experimentation. And the stuff invented by entrepreneurs in China, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere will trickle back to the developed countries, which, as Meeker points out, have the advantage of nearly ubiquitous wireless broadband.
On top of that, it seems that each generation of computing and communications technology sets the stage for faster growth in the next generation. Mobile broadband is spreading faster than the original landline Internet; Android was adopted even more rapidly than
