Right about now I'm asking myself why it is that IBM doesn't own a phone company. It used to. It was Rolm. Tipped off by Enderle, I am thinking about what moves and what doesn't move in the computer industry.
What's moving now is the peripherals market, and the hottest peripherals are now owned by Apple. They are enabled by the network market and the hottest networks are still boring, but the changing of new and old protocols are making it interesting. Matters of net neutrality, Flash vs Ogg vs H.264 and the adoption of cloud strategies are what's making it interesting. Database technology is undergoing a renaissance too.
Only Google seemed to have its head in the game of comprehensively coming up with a 'new' computing paradigm which is network centric and going after the desktop. That was until the introduction of Apple's iPad. Apple now has an opportunity and is showing evidence of the vision to disintermediate Microsoft's desktop domination.
Think about it this way. The desktop has been, for a generation, the dominant computing metaphor. It is how must computing work is done today and it is the desktop metaphor including the mouse and keyboard that is how must of us do what we call 'computing'. 30 years ago it was the green screen. 10 years before that it was the punched card. What are you touching when you are using a computer? That is the question. Those who define and dominate win, and it starts with the generation of data and ends with the consumption of data. That, broadly speaking is what the computer industry is all about, it is about interface domination. What goes on in the black box is only of concern to the industry professionals - the battles in the marketplace are won and lost on interface.
For example. What is gaming? Gaming is an interface market with competition between the iPhone + iPad, XBox360, PS3, DS, Wii, and the Desktop. The game console wars are pretty much over and the winner is Microsoft. They dominate and so now everyone must write to XBox. However Microsoft has opened up a new front with Project Natal. Interface.
All this has to do with HP + Palm because HP has perhaps determined that it needs to be its own software integrator. HP can now extend its compute capacity into a new interface. This is key.
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