I-Tek

The mobile web anno 2009 is comparable to the desktop web of 1998; at least, thats what Jakob Nielsen says. His opinion is valued because he is an authority on usability and has a Ph.D. on human-computer interaction.

The Nielsen’s Law is named after him and states that home bandwith doubles every 21 months. Because this growth rate is slower than the growth in processor power predicted by the Moore’s law, user experience is bound by the bandwidth.

Because of this, one can deduct that the so-called “cloud computing” will not take off in the traditional sense of the word.

Back to the mobile web. It is growing, and growing fast. Between 2006 and 2008 the number of regular mobile web users doubled. As the devices become more and more bandwidth hogs and 3G cellular networks grow as well, the number of active users says more about the actual usage of the mobile web.

Nielsen Mobile even concludes that the mobile web growth is 8x the computer-based web growth. As Nielsen Mobile based the conclusions on unique audience numbers, they are probably quite accurate. When looking at the numbers, one can conclude that computer-based web usage has had its first fast growth and now has reached its steady-state with some organic growth. On the other hand, the actual number of users of the mobile web is growing fast but still relatively small in comparison to the number of users of the computer-based web.

The future? In Japan, there are already as much mobile as computer-based web users. They are most probable the same users. Comscore says email checking is the most used mobile internet application.

Looking at my own internet usage, I use my mobile device to check my email and my computer to surf the web. I suppose most people do the same…