On the 29th of May, Mary Meeker released her annual compendium of the digital state of the world – the KPCB Internet Trends. For those who may not remember, Mary Meeker was a veteran who survived the dot.com crash and also the financial crisis of 2008, as the head of tech research for Morgan Stanley. She was named as among the 10 smartest people in Tech. She now serves as a partner at KPCB (Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers) and has been publishing her annual opus for a few years now.

The problem is that when you’re Mary Meeker, you can get away by putting out a deck with 294 slides. For us mere mortals, reading and absorbing this encyclopaedia of information is a challenge by itself. Every year I get this and carefully save the deck to read in detail and of course, it never happens. So this year, with the benefit of a relatively free weekend, I thought I would do a first pass and pull out some of the most interesting things that I found in the report. So here are my top 10 interesting things to take away from the Mary Meeker report – some of them confirm what we know, while others are what we didn’t know, or are truly counter-intuitive.

What I knew or suspected.

1. The devices story mobile device shipments growth has shrunk to zero. This confirms what we’ve known for a while – device evolution has stalled since Steve Jobs. And since Samsung, the largest manufacturer has a ‘follow Apple’ strategy. Will we see a new device redefine growth or will the we see a decline in shipment numbers next year? HMD – are you watching? (Slide 6)

2. The decline in desktop use despite overall growth. While mobile internet growth is expected, it’s the ‘other devices’ that is interesting. This will presumably include netbooks, etc. but also smart things. I expect in future this category will be broken out to reflect the detail on Internet of Things. (Slide 11)

3. The privacy paradox will be one to watch – after all data is how every single provider improves their services, while keeping prices low, which leads to user spending more time and sharing more data. Versus the regulators needs to protect consumers and protect data use. This will be a key axis of debate going forward and will determine the balance between innovation and protection. Unfortunately Meeker’s slides don’t carry too much insight on this by way of data. (Slides 31-36)

What I didn’t know (I’m intentionally using the singular, as you may well be aware of this)

1. While we’re aware that big tech now dominates the market cap list, what should worry the rest of the pack is how they dominate the R&D spending list, which points to a continuation of their dominance at the top. The top 15 R&D investors list is dominated by 6 technology firms, with 2 each from automotive, petroleum, telcos, Pharma), with GE as the only conglomerate. The top 5 in the list are Amazon, Alphabet, Intel, Apple, and Microsoft. Also, tech firms report the highest growth in R&D, with 9% CAGR and 18% YoY growth. (Slides 40-41)

2. We know that image recognition is an area where AI has now passed the human levels of accuracy leading to all kind of applications across scan analysis in healthcare, and more controversial applications such as face recognition. Now, voice-based natural language recognition is another areas as also demonstrated recently by Google. This should drive a revolution in customer contact centres and in human-computer interfaces in general. (Slide 25)

3. The extent to whichAmazon & Google are getting to dominate the enterprise AI race. To be honest, we know instinctively that the AI race will be one by players with the largest data stockpile. But the range of services being offered for enterprise customers is still an eye-opener. We’ve just started playing around with Google’s Dialogflow, but they also have Tensor (cloud-based H/w), the recently announced AutoML (machine learning), and Vision API (Image recognition), while Amazon has AWS based tools such as Rekognition (image recognition), Comprehend (NLP), Sagemaker (ML framework), and of course their AWS GPU clusters. (Slide 198 – 200)

4. The growth of Fortnight and Twitch on the gaming front – pushes forward what we saw with Pokemon Go. The sweet spot between the hardcore platform based gamers and the casual gamers and kids where millions of people get just a little bit more involved about game, that does not need a special platform – is the story behind Fortnight (Slide 24)

What I didn’t expect

1. The highest increase in spending in enterprise IT is in networking equipment. This is a surprise. I haven’t found the data on this yet, and while the 2nd and 3rd place results don’t surprise me, (AI and hyper-converged infrastructure), my curiosity is definitely piqued by why companies are spending more on networking equipment – connecting to cloud environments from the enterprise perhaps? More connected devices and environments?

2. I’m seeing a lot more confirmation of the models of lifelong learning. This is repeated by Meeker, but her really interesting insight is around how much more learning freelancers invest in compared to their presumably complacent employee counterparts. Perhaps unsurprisingly the top courses sought include AI & related subjects, cryptocurrency, maths and English. (Slides 236 and 233)

3. Meeker makes a great point but Slack and dropbox and I wouldn’t have picked these 2 companies as the flagbearers of consumer-grade technology in the enterprise. But clearly, they are among the most penetrated consumer style tools in the corporate environment. (Slides 264-268)

Meeker has a big section on the Job market, on-demand jobs and future jobs. She also makes the same point others have made about how all technologies so far has created net new jobs. While I agree with this backlog, history is not always the best predictor of the future. And the fact that there will be net new jobs tends to gloss over the significant short-term and geographical disruption in livelihoods that is likely to occur. Think Detroit or Sheffield. There may be more automotive and steel manufacturing jobs today than in 1980 but they are in China, not in Detroit or Sheffield. And so of not much solace to the unemployed factory worker and his / her family in these towns. This may well be the story of AI – but potentially at a larger scale and possibly in a shorter time frame. (See slides 147-163).

There are also useful slides on the gig economy and on-demand jobs now being a scaled phenomenon. (Slides 164-175)

There are also entire sections on China, Immigration and Advertising – which I’ve not delved into as they are currently of less interest to me personally. The E-commerce section also didn’t have anything that jumped out at me as noteworthy. Happy to be corrected!