IBM to Double Investment in Mobile, as Part of "Mobile First" PlanI

International Business Machines Corp., the world’s biggest computer-services provider, will double its investment in mobile technology in 2013, not including acquisitions it could make. IBM also has dubbed the initiative "MobileFirst," a move that, at this point, should not surprise anybody.

According to analysts at the Yankee Group, enterprise workers rank smart phones and notebooks about equally, as key tools for their work. 

To be sure, the direction does not mean "mobile only." And some firms will not design their strategies around "mobile first," either, where it comes to content creation. 

Content consumption is another matter, though. Consumers are migrating away from PC-based Internet usage and are increasingly using mobile devices as their default gateway to the Internet, according to  International Data Corporation. That shift to "mobile first" Internet access is especially pronounced in the U.S. market. 

In fact, perhaps for the first time, the number of people using PCs for Internet access is shrinking, even as PC access grows elsewhere in the world. That doesn't necessarily mean the number of fixed access lines drops, only that PCs are not the devices using those connections. 



Other studies back up those contentions. The use of mobile devices to access the Internet is becoming the medium of choice, with 69 percent of all Internet users surveyed doing so daily, according to Mobile Web Watch 2012, a study of consumers in Europe, Latin America and South Africa conducted by Accenture..

In addition, consumers are using multiple devices to connect to the web, including smart phones (61 percent), netbooks (37 percent), and tablets (22 percent), the Accenture study suggests.

The study found that emerging economies such as Brazil, South Africa and Russia also have rapidly adopted mobile devices (more than 70 percent, on average) to access the Internet, Accenture says.