Déjà vu

In an attempt to forecast what the growth of Internet users may be over the next few years, I came up with a very simple realization after analysing the data from Gapminder: the current (2004) distribution of Internet users resembles the distribution of phone users back in 1996:



Notice how after making a selection of 12 countries with significant populations and grouping them, the distribution in both cases is very similar with the U.S. & Canada leading the pack.

The reason I make this comparison is because we know exactly how the number of phone users grew over the last 10 years and if we consider that the type of infrastructure development that is required to acquire new Internet users follows a similar path than the one that was required to acquire phone users:

• Backbone infrastructure
• Last-mile connectivity
• Device deployment
• Cultural adoption of technology

And the same corporations are in charge of both operations, so it is to be expected they would follow a similar business plan to the one that already worked a few years ago.

So, take a look at how the story ends for phone users after 8 years:



The obvious conclusion is that China will have the predominant user base with half of their population plugged-in, assuming over 35% of the total Internet user base. A recent story from BusinessWeek showcasing the Best Leaders includes Robin Li, CEO of Baidu.com, is probably hinting at the fact that the natural evolution of the web is to migrate all the tools we know to chinese and massively add users. Baidu is a success story because it was able to beat Google at their own game in the Chinese market.

However, there are more dramatic consequences to the evolution shown above: the web that we know today can not be the same web that will serve half of the population of China. Such a large user base will likely be quite influential to shift the technology to address their needs. A few more observations from this analysis:

• Most Chinese living in urban areas will likely be users of the web


• It is hard to imagine that they will all have access to a computer as we know them, so technology is probably going to scale-down to allow for very cheap and simple models for low-end users. (Think the One Laptop per Child project)


• Such a huge segment will likely promote innovation and "connected to the web" will likely be accomplished in other ways than opening a browser a navigating through web pages. It has to be easier than that for so many people to adopt it this fast

Originally posted in the Global Culture blog