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" 'The major labels want to say the glass is half full,' says Gwen Stefani's manager Jim Guerinot. 'I think everybody's getting the message: You better get a f***ing smaller glass. The music business is a different game.' " --Rolling Stone Magazine, January 13 2006Most people agree that the Internet and technology changes will make it possible to replace the pipe companies – the carriers, publishers, and networks that deliver the world's information, entertainment, and communication. But that...

The Germans have a great phrase: "egg-laying woolly milk pig." That's the term for a product that fails because it tries to be everything to everyone. In a speech at a PalmSource developer conference several years ago, I described Pocket PC as an egg-laying woolly milk pig, and I think that's still a good explanation of why it's popular with enthusiasts but has failed to broadly expand the handheld market. Unfortunately, though, I think the strongest example of the syndrome on the market today...

PDA 24/7 just ran an interview with me. In one of my answers, I talked about which device companies "get it" – which ones understand how to make a truly effective smart mobile solution. Looking back at my answer, I realized I had left out a couple of companies. I want to correct that oversight.Before I list the companies, I should explain what I mean by "get it." I think that a truly effective smart mobile device must be both focused and integrated. By focused, I mean that it must first and foremost...

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the carriers."--Henry VI Part 2, as performed by the Silicon Valley Royal Shakespeare CompanyI want to let you in on a little secret: the company most disliked by people in Silicon Valley is not Microsoft. It's not Google either. And no, it's not Intel, Apple, eBay, or even SCO.Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people who want those companies dead, but even the hostility toward Microsoft at the peak of its power pales in comparison to the contempt that...

Today we have a great case study in how incomplete statistics can confuse people about the use of data services on mobile phones.A Nokia manager recently gave a talk on the use of data services on mobiles. The presentation said that 63% of packet traffic generated by smartphones is Web browsing. Unfortunately, the presentation is no longer posted, but it was excerpted by Simon Judge's weblog, and subsequently reposted by Russell Beattie of Yahoo, who runs a very high-traffic mobile weblog that's...

Scott McNealy as quoted by the Register:"I guarantee you it will be hard to sell an iPod five or seven years from now when every cell phone can access your entire music library wherever you are."Scott, I guarantee you that even if it's easy for any phone to access your online music library five years from now, most users will prefer to store the music locally so they don't have to pay a big wireless download fee every time they want to listen to Bohemian Rhapsody, and so the song won't stop in the...

Google's new video store seems to be up and running. I say "seems to be" because when I looked at it my first reaction was, "Is that it? You guys used a CES keynote to announce that?" The interface is simple, as you'd expect from Google, but in this case simple means simplistic and primitive. The home page features three types of video – for sale, most popular, and random. To examine for-sale videos by category, you use a drop-down menu that lists each series available: classics like MacGyver, Star...

I'd like to thank the folks at PDA 24-7 for naming Mobile Opportunity one of the two best mobile-related weblogs of 2005.This would probably be a good time to say what I'm hoping to accomplish with this blog. I set it up as a way to share what I've learned about mobile computing, plus any other interesting tech-related information I run into in the course of my consulting work. So you're going to get a mix of mobile and non-mobile information. I'm not trying to advocate any particular company or...

Yes and no.But mostly no. It doesn't matter the way the OS companies want it to.Recently two telecom analysts in Europe published essays saying that there isn't going to be a winner in the mobile OS wars. The UK research firm ARC Chart wrote, "far from the market consolidating around one or two of major OS platforms, the number of middleware systems for which applications can be developed for is actually increasing.... The mobile OS story is no longer simply about a war between Microsoft and Nokia."(Actually,...