The big merger of 2008: The mobile phone and Web

This is a series that flows directly from Mark Anderson’s annual predictions, presented here in exclusive detail for The Industry Standard.

Much has been made of the mobile phone's progress as a device, now shipping more than one billion units a year into an installed base that will soon approach half the people on the planet.

There's also been a great deal of discussion about Net Neutrality, whether carriers used to charging rents for the difficulty of reading their bills will be able to shift into a world of open services.

By predicting that the phone and Web worlds will merge during this year, I'm suggesting that Net Neutrality is essentially a done deal, that the world of walled gardens is over (at least for carriers), and that we need to start looking beyond devices to see the real action. After all, if these worlds merge, the focus will go onto the services themselves, and onto how they are integrated across all the platforms users encounter in a normal day.

For programmers, this is a huge challenge: What you write for the office PC has to work on the phone, and what you were writing for the phone has to be accessible and smart-looking on a much larger screen. Are you ready?

For the carriers, the challenge is even greater: Are you AT&T, or Verizon? By this I mean, do you put big money into lying about your greatest vulnerability (re-labeling broadband, telling folks you have the best network when you don't), or into real service, such as more fiber to the home, more wireless towers, a better selection of customer services?

I'm betting on the Verizon model. Make the investment early, and never bet against bandwidth.

(To its credit, I should note that AT&T did the deal with Apple for the iPhone, even if it meant putting the first broadband data phone on an aging, mid-band network; and it looks like they may be open to Google's Android phone as well. Verizon had better wake up quickly to the need for next gen devices at the edge.)

In SNS language, we'd say the Box Guys have beaten the Pipes Guys, and the real value add will be in software/services, such as Apple's new smash hit with visual voicemail, as it's been for the last decade in computing. All of the real paydirt available to the carriers now lies in radically new ventures, rather than in lobbyists and lawyers; some won't get it, and perhaps won't make the cut. The ones who, like the MCI of long ago, understand the power of hard-to-copy software and services fitted to the customer, will prevail.

And how will people react to this change? We already have tribes on phones; in fact, they began there, thanks to MCI Friends and Family billing, long before Facebook. Today T-Mobile seems the most understanding and aware of the social trends and needs of its young customer base; with their myFaves plans; no doubt others will copy and follow.

How does Facebook play on your phone? The answer is changing daily, but obviously the real endgame is not only that you can do anything from here or there, mobile or office or home, but that you can make each experience more productive by being integrated.

Just when this all gets sorted out, real voice recognition is going to appear. It just might come from new player vlingo, which claims to have 100% accuracy on millions of words for untrained systems. The company, originally set up to do Blackberry speech to text, is now moving to mobile phones, and will be featured as a FireStarter company at our Future in Review 2008 conference this May.

Once voice recognition is working properly on mobile phones, will it move to the desktop? It