Update to Grand Convergence Theory - by 2025 value of mobile industry globally to be around 4 Trillion dollars

Last week I presented a keynote in Skopje Macedonia where I did an update to my projections related to ‘Grand Convergence’. Some of our readers will probably want to see what the latest numbers look like. So this is an update to the ‘biggest race in human history’ or the 7 Trillion dollar collision of 17 separate giant global industries.

17 INDUSTRIES COLLIDE

Grand Convergence is the merger of 17 giant worldwide industries which are all headed to digital. Some were born digital like social media. Some drove the digital revolution like telecoms. Others found digital forced upon themselves like music. And some are still unsure exactly how much digital will end up disrupting their business like banking. But I am convinced these 17 industries will all become totally or at least mostly digital. If so, it also means that the vast majority of their business will become ‘mobile’ as our friend Jonathan ‘JMac’ MacDonald is fond of saying, all digital will become mobile. So what are the 17 merging or indeed colliding industries? They are in alphabetical order:

Advertising

Banking

Broadcast (TV and radio)

Cameras

Computers

Credit cards

Gaming

Insurance

Internet

Mapping (includes navigation & compass)

Marketing research

Music

Print (everything from books and magazines to newspapers to posters, postcards, billboards)

Social media

Telecoms

Virtual reality

Watches

Those are the 17 industries which are pretty sure to end up mostly or completely digital. That means they are all headed to mobile, at least for the most part. Some know it and some of their leading companies are fully aware of this like Google in Internet or Apple in Computers or EA in Games or Facebook in Social Media, others are pretty much still bewildered or confused. But these 17 are now in an open ‘death match’ where anyone can become their rival and eat their business, not unlike how Nokia, Samsung and Apple wiped out most of the stand-alone camera industry. Or how computer maker Apple took over the music business with iPod and iTunes. Or how now Sweden is now openly talking of becoming the first cashless society.

To illustrate this race, I have  been showing my diagram of the race with the oval where mobile is in the middle and those industries are arrayed outside the elliptical line. This is the base diagram:




You’ll note that all arrows are the same length but are of differing thickness. The width of the arrow tells you how big the industry is. Broadcast for example is a 600 Billion dollar global industry but Music is worth only about 25 Billion dollars. This helps illustrate how large any of the major industries is in rough relationship to each other. Then I have shown annually the evolution of this race, how much of the total industry has migrated into the circle like this:




So today we can see that about 1.6 Trillion dollars (1,600 Billion dollars) has already been migrated into the circle. This is out of a total value of 7.0 Trillion dollars so about 23% of the migration has been completed. This is what I’ve been showing in recent conferences and workshops. In Skopje I gave an update to the theory, with a new slide showing a projection into year 2025 or a 10 year forecast. This is the new diagram and early projection of which industries will be fast, or which will have their migration mostly completed, and which will be ‘laggards’ slow to migrate into their future.




You’ll see that the total value I have estimated to have migrated in the next ten years is 4 Trillion dollars. When we remove the 1.6 Trillion dollars so far, it means in the next ten years the migrated value of industried shifting to digital and mobile will be about 2.4 Trillion dollars. The GROWTH in ‘mobile’ in the next ten years will be larger than the established TOTAL VALUE of Mobile today! And mobile has been the fastest-growing global industry in human economic history. As my friend and fellow statistician and forecaster of the mobile industry, Chetan Sharma likes to say, we are only entering the golden age of mobile.

The one other thing I wanted to add is the recently added ‘last slide’ of the theory. The other HUGE industries which will be partially coming to digital and mobile but which probably will not become fully digital in the next few decades. I have not attempted to find every ‘big’ global industry. I have only taken the ‘huge’ ones that are worth 1 Trillion dollars each, or more. They are in alphabetical order:

Cars

Education

Farming

Government

Healthcare

Restaurants

Retail

Travel

These eight industries will all see anywhere from 10% to 40% of their total value going digital and mobile. I have not yet been able to give a precise count of the level of that transition for each of these, but want to indicate that these ‘cannibals’ are at the gates, and will also want to take their slice of mobile, both contributing to the industry but also presenting a threat and could radically alter how the mobile/digital industry evolves. So this is what that slide looks like. Note that the 'industries in green' will become fully digital but the industries in orange color will also join partially in the race to digital and mobile and that includes some of the biggest industries on the planet today like retail and farming




We see examples of this interest in all sorts of places for example with how Coca Cola has changed the mobile industry radically by inventing mobile payments (original Coca Cola vending machines were the first instance of where you could pay for something by SMS already 17 years ago). Apple Pay, NTT DoCoMo's Osaifu Keitai and Kenya's M-Pesa all owe a debt of gratitude to that Coca Cola vending machine invention already a decade before the iPhone was launched. If you look at the innovations around the world very often then now are in areas outside of traditional tech and media, such as the London tourism innovation of talking statues (via QR codes and NFC connectivity at statues connecting with mobile phones carried by tourists). As I visited in Finland last week I saw that the same idea has now been adopted for statues in Helsinki too. That kind of stuff. Look at retail and you see massive innovations using mobile. Same in travel, healthcare, education and so forth.

For those who want to see in more detail what the near future looks like, you might enjoy the forecast of mobile by the most accurate forecaster in mobile... my latest forecast is available from here.

Comments

[Wayne Borean]

You've missed one. Politics.

Politics is separate from Government. Government regulates and provides services. Politics is how the electorate communicates their wishes to Government.

Considering how much is spent on political campaigns, outreach programs to get voters to the polls, etc., Politics is a fairly big player. And it impacts all of the others...

[eduardom]

I am wondering what impact the newly developing decentralization technologies like IPFS and Ethereum will have on these trends. It seems to me they will speed them up, and also tend to take market share away from the incombents.

[Lullz]

@Tomi

It's actually incredible how little work has been done on some of those areas even while they will be huge. Take education as an example. We have just seen some simple educational games, e-books and other relatively trivial stuff moved to the mobile of to the ultra portable tablets. What remains to be seen is the true revolution and it can't take long before all that really starts to happen.

One example. In a global world one great way of learning about other cultures is learning their language. For learning a language one best ways of improving and getting further from the start is to talk with a native person. It's actually amazing how there seems to be no educational apps designed for this purpose. How easy would it be if you had some kind of chatting AI for doing that? Add speech recognition and some code it to chat with you and correct your mistakes. We have chatting apps, we have speech recognition apps and even apps designed to teach a language. Despite all that we don't have a hands free app for doing all that in one package. Doing something like that and doing it well would definitely revolutionize the learning experience. This kind of app could be used for math, history, or pretty much anything.

That's definitely a huge market.

[E.Casais]

@Lulz

"For learning a language one best ways of improving and getting further from the start is to talk with a native person."

This is already happening in a digital way -- but not with AI, which is too far-fetched.

There are language-learning services whereas you use Skype to have interactive, customized long-distance lessons with native speakers (e.g. I at least know one such service for Spanish delivered from Mexico).

[Lullz]

@E.Casais

It's true. There is already services like that and those will be superior to AI solutions. However there would be a market for a cheaper service you could use at any time and without additional cost. An app like that wouldn't need to be able to talk about everything possible but there could be some topics it could be limited to. Maybe the technology is not yet there and the biggest problem might be making the speech recognition to understand broken language the beginners speak. Something like that wouldn't replace a real teacher but why not since the technologies are mostly already there.

[Wayne Borean]

Heh. I've been working on learning Latin using Rosetta. Felis dormit is about as far as I've got (the cat is sleeping).

[Winter]

@Lullz
"For learning a language one best ways of improving and getting further from the start is to talk with a native person."

Actually, pen-pals as a way to practice language skills have a long history and have been used by high schools in many countries. Using skype is a natural extension of that.

An even better way is used by children everywhere, without them realizing it. The second best way to learn a new language, after living there, is watching TV in that language (the third is reading).

Due to broadband connections, children can watch their favorite anime and soap shows. So I hear about children binge watching subtitled Korean and Japanese shows. After 400 episodes of an Anime series, you start to recognize words, even if you do not even try.

If you are skeptical, English language TV is the reason Danish and Dutch children are orders of magnitude better in Englush than German children.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/yourvoice/classroom_talk3.shtml

http://www.thepolyglotdream.com/scandinavianenglish/

[NO ONE WANTS WINDOWS]

....and microsoft will miss it all. You just got to love it!

http://mashable.com/2015/11/19/windows-phone-q3-shipping-data/#nYXZBm6wlsqw

All you microsoft astroturfers repeat over and over in the shower: NO ONE WANTS WINDOWS ON A PHONE!

[Winter]

@Lullz
"The current system is probably not perfect."

It is far from perfect. But all methods will have to make students spend time on using language.

If you want to estimate how much time, read this:

The word brain
http://www.thewordbrain.com/

[Winter]

@Lullz
"That was not really my point about the future of this particular area."

Oh, that is rather straightforward: Using automatic speech recognition to evaluate student pronunciation to give them real time feedback when the teacher is not available.

[Winter]

@Lullz
"That was not really my point about the future of this particular area."

I am unable to post the associate link, but can find this yourself:

Automatic Speech Recognition for second language learning: How and why it actually works
Ambra Neri, Catia Cucchiarini, and Wilhelmus Strik
15th ICPhS Barcelona, 2003
p1173-1160

[Winter]

@Lullz
"What's missing is the business and the actual apps for doing that."

Eh, you were talking "about the future of this particular area."

The future is what is not current. If you look back, you will see that current day automated service was yesterdays research project.

But here is an example:

SPEECH RECOGNITION FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING AND EVALUATING: A STUDY OF EXISTING COMMERCIAL PRODUCTS
Rebecca Hincks

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.161.8071

[Tester]

In that case your remark was rather pointless, don't you think?

The mere fact that you point it out seems to imply that the current non-existence of these apps has any meaning on the future.

[NO ONE WANTS WINDOWS]

Here is what the consultants are saying about windows phone. An entertaining read too but the same dead end for crappy WP! LoL!

http://www.eaconsult.com/2015/10/13/the-real-death-of-windows-phone-american-style-part-i/

http://www.eaconsult.com/2015/10/19/the-real-death-of-windows-phone-american-style-part-ii/

microsoft astroturfers remember during the holidays that: NO ONE WANTS WINDOWS ON A PHONE!!!! ..LoL!!!

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Winter

Sorry about that with our little troll. I deleted all his/her comments in this thread.

Lullz. Behave yourself. I gave you more latitude in the thread about smartphones but here stick to the topic and behave nicely. People who come to read this blog article are not our little club of regulars who argue endlessly about smartphones. So I will be more strict here.

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Winter]

Tomi

I do not mind if you also remove my comments responding to Lullz.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Winter

Done :-)

Oh. PS - I left the ones about education, I think they were very good and add value to the discussion plus nice link, thanks

Tomi :-)

[NO ONE WANTS WINDOWS]

Windows spying gets worse:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2015/11/30/microsoft-monday-windows-10-spying-becomes-worse-gates-invests-in-clean-energy-plans-for-older-ie/

Only a buffoon would want to put this insecure spyware crap on a phone! ...microsoft is trending towards irrelevance and will never be a big part of the mobile world. Today they are just an abusive monopoly generally ignored by everyone using mobility.

Hey microsoft astroturfers hold hands in a circle and yell out: NO ONE WANTS WINDOWS ON A PHONE!!!!

[NO ONE WANTS WINDOWS]

Latest Windows phone news ...the piece of crap WP is tightening its circle of the drain. Just love it! Tic, toc, tic, toc to the eventual flush as our moronic astroturfers would say while waiting for moore's law. Too funny. Look at all the articles speading the word that WP is crap!

http://betanews.com/2015/12/04/windows-10-mobile-is-dead-in-the-water/

http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/04/idc-predicts-sluggish-windows-phone-sales-growth/

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3011949/windows-phone-os/idc-windows-phone-down-10-percent-as-smartphone-growth-slows.html

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/113464/20151205/windows-phone-future-still-bleak-despite-windows-10-idc-predicts-sluggish-growth.htm

Hey all you microsoft astroturfers, when shopping tell everyone: NO ONE WANTS WINDOWS ON A PHONE!

[chithanh]

@Baron95
Tomi's blog, Tomi's rules. If you don't like them, go elsewhere or start your own blog. I hear dominies-communicate are desperately looking for talented writers.