While looking for information on how CTIA 2009 in San Diego went, I found an article by Richard Wong (who is a venture capitalist with Accel Partners) titled on “The rise of open mobile (and congratulations Android team)“.

A good article by Richard, he reminisces on how mobility used to be in the early days of apps (i.e. year ~2000) when operators were in total control — I do remember those days very well and all the unnecessary control and FUD that literally pushed innovation back about 10 years. Richard then compares that past with what he observed at CTIA 2009 and the lots of noise related to Android — the shift from an operator-controlled mobile world to “Open Mobile” players such as Android.

I have written about this before, on how “control” have been and will continue to shift from the operator and to the ecosystem — the developer and community where developers create (and add) value via their software innovations in applications, where the ecosystem, open systems and common sense will be the drivers for success, where the new deck is the “deck that is on the cloud” and users drive which application succeed or not via simple “application demand”, ranking, recommendations and comments.

For this shift that we are (finally) getting to see we have to thank Apple and Google, but these are recent players. We must recognize the impact made by the Mobile Web and also what triggered it all back in 1999 — Sun with their mobile Java technologies as well as the good old WAP.

I do believe the Android market is going to explode globally becoming a predominant mobile platform together with the iPhone, and that native/local apps will continue to rule for quite a while.

Update Oct 21: Days after I wrote the above, TechCrunch wrote a piece validating my post above on Android; see Android Avalanche: A Complete List Of The Android Phones So Far.

ceo