Wall Street’s siren discovers the mobile Web — watch out!

Back in the good (or were they bad?) old days of the dot-com bubble, there was a coterie of analysts, most working for big Wall Street investment banking firms, who never met an Internet stock they didn’t like. Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley was one of them.

Meeker is in the news again because she’s been running around the country with a 48-slide presentation that marvels at the growth of the mobile Web and how much faster it has taken off than Web 1.0, her term for the desktop Web. In any case, Meeker is all a-twitter because 11 quarters after launch, the iPhone and iPod Touch have some 86 million users, while AOL (remember it?) had just 8 million users 11 quarters after its launch.  

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When I came across a reference to her study and mentioned it to a colleague, he thought he’d heard about it — last year. Hmm. He was right. Meeker published a very similar study (even the slides are about the same) in 2009. In fact, here’s the story InfoWorld published on that topic last December.

Recycling old material is bad enough (OK, she’s updated some number by an additional two quarters), but Meeker’s breathless conclusion is so stunningly obvious that it isn’t worth much. Think about it: AOL was born when hardly anyone had heard of the Internet, and those who had were accessing it with slowpoke analog modems. Early adopters were indeed treading into new territory, so of course it took years for Web use to develop momentum.

Flash-forward to the launch of the iPhone. Nearly everyone had Internet access, and the vast majority of those who did were accessing the Web via broadband and had probably owned two or more computers. So when Apple provided a device that would let them access the Web from a device small enough to stick in a pocket, moving to the mobile Web wasn’t much of a stretch. Of course tech-savvy people jumped at it, and by 2007 there were tens of millions of them.

Why am I beating up on an analyst many of you have never heard of? Meeker and others caused a good deal of grief by pumping up the value of companies that never should have gone public, let alone sported market caps of hundred of millions, even billions, of dollars (remember Pets.com?). Yes, the mobile Web is growing ferociously and is creating legitimate opportunities for investment and employment. It doesn’t need to by hyped — in fact, you should be wary of those who do hype it, because you can be sure they have an agenda.

Bill Snyder writes InfoWorld’s Tech’s Bottom Line blog.

This article, “Wall Street’s siren discovers the mobile Web — watch out!,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog.