When I see the news about HP, Nokia, and RIM, I feel like the end of an era may be at hand. But I admire the courage that HP’s leadership has in looking to drastically change its core business. Margins on PCs are very slim and so in order to generate a good chunk of revenue, the company has to generate a tremendous volume. I remember whenever I’ve had to buy a PC, I’ve always looked for the best price with the best specs. A couple times, I’ve even built my own computer back about 10 years ago because it was cheaper back then to do so. Today, with the slim margins, the competitive nature of the industry and the commoditization of PCs, it makes sense for companies to HP to really think about whether it’s in its long-term benefit to continue to pump out a commoditized product. The difference between a company like HP and Apple is that Apple is vertically integrated and can control the entire end-to-end experience from a hardware and software perspective. Companies that use a licensed OS cannot do this.

Regarding Nokia, I think we will see the Nokia-MS partnership bear fruit in the next year or 2. And to be honest, I hope to see some innovation from them. Competition is the best driver of innovation and personally, I would hate to see a company like Nokia continue to struggle.  They’ve decided to focus on Windows for their smartphones going forward and have also recently announced their intention to penetrate the North American market by being very aggressive with pricing.  To be honest, I think there’s a good chance they may be able to do pretty well, if the recent Meego N9 is any indication of where things are going.

And finally RIM. I’ve been a BlackBerry user for the good part of almost 10 years before moving over to Android for work purposes. They have a lot of work to do to begin excite people again en masse. What the BlackBerry does well, it does exceptionally well, but these features (aside from perhaps BBM) are not sexy features that people get excited about and cause them to spend a lot of money. Imagine you are looking to buy a car and at the dealership the salesman pitches the following attributes of the car you’re considering: fuel efficiency, number of airbags, number of cupholders, and the comfort of the seats and ergnomics. These are all important features for many people and may in fact be the key differentiators that people look at when trying to decide 2 identical cars. But, they are not ‘WOW’ features. Wow features when purchasing a car are things like: horsepower, torque, external styling, the way the ‘electric blue’ color looks, alloy rims on 19″ wheels, and overall sex appeal. Some of RIM’s competitors just have more ‘sex appeal’ and this is what drives mass consumption and genuine excitement. It sounds like RIM is looking to change things up with QNX and I do hope it goes well for RIM. Again, it is better to have more competitors to drive innovation and also for people to have choice.

Overall, it appears that the industry is heading towards a state where it will be a clash of platforms that are anchored by hardware manufacturers.  In other words, I think in the long-term (relatively speaking), we will see Google-Motorola anchor the Android platform with several OEMs also producing Android phones, Microsoft-Nokia anchoring the Windows platform with OEMs also producing Windows Phones, and of course Apple with iOS and RIM with QNX.  It looks like a formidable battle.  My the odds be ever in your favor!

Google will likely bid on the upcoming 700Mhz spectrum auction and if they end up acquiring it with or without a carrier partner, it is a huge step for the search engine. What started as an extremely sophisticated search algorithm has morphed into a company with the 4th largest market capitalization in the US and the backbone of the internet. It is without a doubt one of the most innovative companies of this generation. The purchase of spectrum and the release of Android signifies what pundits all over the world have been talking about for years, that the internet will move to the mobile wireless arena and its growth will be exponential. Just recently there was a report published saying that global handheld sales outpaced that of desktop PCs. Convergence of the internet, wireless service and computers will continue and only those companies that can re-invent itself will be left when the dust settles.

Android, internet, spectrum and the organization of the world’s information are the ingredients for Google’s strategy in these rapidly converging industries. I think in the longterm, Android will end up becoming a huge threat to the Windows Mobile platform and will overtake them. As for the BlackBerry software, there is nothing, that the Apple or even Google (with current information) can do to penetrate the enterprise market that RIM holds so dear (as for the consumer segment, the jury is still out on that). The main difference between RIM’s strategy and everyone else’s is that they provide end-to-end solutions for email starting with the email server, network infrastructure to hardware to the OS. This is the crux of RIM’s strategy, success and survival from the enterprise perspective. As long as they can keep that barrier to entry by way of defending their IP, they will be good for many more years to come in the enterprise space.

What makes Google so dangerous to the traditional carriers, handset manufacturers and software developers is that they aren’t jumping into wireless to make money in the same way that everyone else has been, but to provide yet again another platform to deliver its services like Gmail, Google Search and Google Checkout, which all of course serve as platforms to deliver targeted ads. The more accessible these services become, the more sticky or convenient it is for people. It will be through the way Google operates itself in wireless, rather than through the actual product they offer that it will disrupt wireless.

Whatever the outcome of the spectrum auction or the adoption of Android, I would love to see Google, RIM and Apple battle it out for the consumer space. Competition from these guys will only benefit the little people like myself.