TMT Predictions 2011
I was at Deloitte’s 2011 TMT predictions seminar presented by Duncan Stewart.
Every year around this time Deloitte’s consultans make some predictions regarding technology trends for the year ahead. They have created a lot of buzz around this over the last few years since their predictions are fairly accurate year after year.
This year had some interesting items and I’d like to mention some of them here on our blog
- Last year Deloitte predicted there would be 12M tablets sold around the world in 2010. They were almost spot on. This year they say this number will continue to grow exponentially essentially stealing enormous market share from laptops, netbooks and Desktop PC’s. One prediction that was interesting was that business world will embrace the tablet this year, especially the one RIM (makers of Blackberry) is launching.I tend to agree. We lug around our laptops to run presentations, or have access to email, when all we need is a tablet that can do all that. Most of us don’t need the processor power on the road.
- Verizon and AT&T are spending millions of ad dollars in the US claiming their 4G is better and promising speeds unheard of before in the mobile world. Deloitte claims 4G standard is only needed in the US due to the network congestion there, and most of the world’s large carriers will only upgrade to the 3.5G standard in 2011(speeds of 2-10 Mbps), which is enough for almost everybody.
- One other prediction I found striking is certainly one that bets against outrageous market caps attributed to Facebook.
Bottom line is Google’s revenues are about $30B and they have a market cap of around $200B.
Go over to Facebook and they have revenues of about $3B, and people claim they may be worth $100B.
The problem with Facebook is that they can’t charge enough for ads due to low click rates compared to search advertising. With about 500M users signed up, user saturation is approaching and at around 1B users they’ll hit a natural ceiling. All they have left to increase ad revenues at that point is to increase impressions per user (i.e. time spent on site) and that will take years to do as they understand how to increase engagement.
Listening to this I thought about MySpace. In terms of engagement, I think MySpace has the right idea, but they don’t have the users. I think we may see more MySpace-like content in Facebook in the next few years.
- In terms of mobile operating systems, everybody is wondering who the mobile Microsoft will be. (i.e who will own 90% market share). Deloitte predicts, at least in 2011, we won’t see a market leader. iOS will remain strong, as will RIM. Android will increase some market share, yet they are only as good as the devices they run on and they have no control over the quality of those devices. For better or worse, Apple makes solid devices, but everybody makes Android from China to Taiwan and Google has no control over that quality.
At any rate, those were some of my take-aways, but Deloitte’s own site contains some highly recommended reading about these and other topics.
Yavuz Kaynar
Director
iLab Ventures