Morgan Stanley analyst Meeker: Mobile innovation will leave the desktop web in the dust

Mary Meeker, an analyst with Morgan Stanley who’s an expert on Internet and mobile trends, gave a fast-paced talk today at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. It was packed with more points and more data than I can cover in a short post, but the big point was that the mobile internet is taking off — just like the desktop internet a decade or so ago, but much faster.

Meeker was speaking at Atmosphere, a conference that Google is hosting for chief information officers, so she concluded by offering four big ideas for CIOs:

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1. “The desktop internet ramp was just a warm-up act for what we’re seeing happen on the mobile internet.”
2. The pace of mobile innovation is “unprecedented, I think, in world history.”
3. Consumer companies are taking the lead over enterprise companies.
4. “It’s more important than ever to listen to employees” about where to take your IT department.

One of the reasons for the fast adoption and innovation is the convergence of five big trends, Meeker said. Those include the growth of fast 3G mobile networks, social networking, video over the internet, voice over the internet, and impressive mobile devices like the iPhone.

So how can companies expect to make money in this shifting landscape? Echoing points she made at the Web 2.0 Summit last fall, Meeker said the mobile landscape in the rest of the world is where Japan was at the beginning of the decade, so we can look at Japan to see where things are going. This is how mobile internet revenue breaks down in Japan: 66 percent from data access, 21 percent from e-commerce, 11 percent from paid services, 2 percent from mobile advertising.

Meeker also said the success of devices like the iPhone and Android, and the resulting application ecosystems, has allowed Silicon Valley to reclaim the lead in mobile innovation.

“That was something I thought would never happen, in fact I thought all was lost,” Meeker said. She added later, “I think the innovation in the mobile internet is going to be right here in the United States of America for quite a while.”

[photo taken at Web 2.0 Expo, via Flickr/duncandavidson]