Morgan Stanley's uber-analyst Mary Meeker recently published her 671(!) page report on the state (and future) of the mobile internet.  Of her eight "key themes" in the report, one really stood out:

Mobile is Ramping Faster Than Desktop Internet Did and Will Be Bigger Than Most Think - a confluence of five factors (3G + Social Networking + Video + VoIP + Impressive Mobile Devices) Are Driving This Change

Whoa.  Think about that for a second.  Mobile Internet usage is ramping even faster than Desktop usage did between the early 90s and today.  As soon as 2012, smartphones are predicted to outship worldwide PC shipments.

So what does this mean to the customer conversation?  Two things:

  • You need to be thinking now about how you reach customers via the mobile channel
  • More importantly, you need to be thinking now (or, perhaps even last week) about how customers reach you via the mobile channel
Now, this was the slide that blew me away:

Check that out.  Not just the rate of growth, but the magnitude as well.  While the iPhone does not equal the entirety of the mobile market by any means, it's stunning to see that the iPhone + iTouch have 8x the amount of market penetration that AOL did at a similar point in its trajectory, and over 5x the number of users that Netscape did.

This isn't just a wave, or even a tsunami.  Mobile is going to fundamentally change the landscape with respect to how customers and companies connect.