Mobile OS providers have to decide whether or not to open source their software, a trend that arguably Google/Open Handheld Alliance (OHA) put into high gear with Android. This move likely motivated Nokia's recent purchase and subsequent open sourcing of the Symbian operating system. The mobile OS providers must also decide which additional features/capabilities to provide. This is a brutally tough segment to make money in and that's why the movement to open source and/or manage OSes by committee will continue.

The carriers have their own headaches. Which phone makers and subsequently mobile OSes do they run on their telco networks? How do they differentiate their telco networks from the others? How will they compete against Wi-Fi, WiMax, and the recently auctioned wireless spectrums that must be free and open to any application?

The reality is that the traditional/historical products that each of these groups provides are being commoditized and that trend will only continue. What should they do to remain relevant? What can application developers do to future-proof their roadmap?

It's the Applications, Stupid!
It all goes back to differentiation; more specifically, consumers are demanding mobile, real-time, location-aware capabilities that can deliver relevant content and allow them to collaborate in a sophisticated manner with dynamically assembled groups of interest. The money is in the applications and the revenue/advertising dollars directly or indirectly generated from them.

If the differentiation is in the applications, shouldn't the goal be to get that application running on any device and on any network? For companies that have always had a pervasive mindset, the answer is an emphatic "Yes!" yet they remain greatly challenged because of the fragmentation cited earlier.

However, for the three groups - handset makers, mobile OS providers, and network providers - it's a harsher reality. Nonetheless adopting this mentality will provide enormous new business opportunities, and ultimately help offset the commoditization of their traditional product lines. Surely we will begin to see these players compete at the application level, on multiple devices, in particular with location-based services.

This mindset is gaining industry support. Vishy Gopalakrishnan, founder and CTO at Mobility Partners, a wireless and mobility consultant to Fortune 1000 companies, observed at a recent meeting of the New York Software Industry Association (NYSIA), "We see location as something that factors into decisions for building applications." He went on to say, "Look at what Nokia is doing and how it is moving from being a devices company to a software and services company and what Apple is doing with Apple MobileMe - there's a lot of money to be made." Indeed, these applications will generate billions and billions of dollars across every commercial, governmental, and social industry and will change the way we live, work, and play by seamlessly integrating with the "Screens of Life" that we use on a daily basis.

The (Mobile) World Isn't Enough
Ironically, the company with a long pervasive mindset is Microsoft. Despite its aggressive tactics, it is correct in promoting the need for a unified platform to bind together the devices that improve our lives. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have each echoed these sentiments in the past year, albeit from a strictly Microsoft OS perspective. In his CES 2007 keynote, Gates said, "The second digital decade will be more focused on connecting people....[Applications] will run not only on the PC, they'll run up in the Internet, or in the cloud, as we say, on the phone, in the car, in the TV. The applications will use the best of rich platforms and those Internet services."

And Ballmer said at CTIA Wireless & IT last October, "We need to bring together four powerful computing phenomena that exist today: the desktop PC, enterprise computing, mobile services running in the cloud, and phone devices....The other thing which I think our industry needs, so that all of our innovations can add up to where the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts, is really a rich platform that supports work style and lifestyle innovation on the phone."

Microsoft's success rests on the belief that its rigidity will ultimately win the pervasive race. With so much fragmentation in the mobile space, the problem only increases when you add cars and TVs to the mix. Will developers ultimately buy into the Microsoft story? No major competitor has convincingly tackled the pervasive problem yet, even Microsoft. The Linux community has shown a mobility focus of late, but with many different flavors of Linux from many alliances and vendors that don't universally span everything from enterprise to desktop to embedded to phone.

Leave No Developer (or His Customers) Behind
An obvious question remains: What alternatives do software architects and engineers have to build pervasive applications that run on all or various subsets of the devices previously mentioned? What platform will convincingly abstract networks and protocols to finally solve the "write once, run everywhere" conundrum that Java failed to deliver? Advances in next-generation mobile middleware are addressing many of these problems. Such tools will be an integral part of achieving complete interoperability.

To this end, my colleagues at Recursion Software and I have long dreamed of the pervasive world awaiting us. When we announced our Voyager 7 beta this summer, we knew the time for applications that impact every aspect of our lives - from how we work, learn, drive, shop, play, protect ourselves and defend our nation - was upon us. Voyager is the first distributed framework for Windows Mobile, Symbian, Linux, Android, all enterprise and desktop OSes and 15+ embedded OSes that enable peer/group communications. It's a pervasive platform that also introduces social networking, peer-to-peer/group collaboration, interoperability, and intelligence to any wireless node, thus moving beyond Web-centric applications.

When you stop to think about the pervasive world awaiting us, there's no limit to the possibilities. With the introduction of increasingly pervasive platforms, excuses about fragmentation and technology limitations are becoming harder to justify. Getting developers, as well as business managers, to leave their Symbian, Android, and .NET silos and think pervasively is the first step.