I’m really loving the Firefox 3 smart location bar.  The ability to retrace my steps by typing one or two keywords speeds things up.  AND it lets me skip Google.  Wait a minute…did I just say “skip Google”?  Raise any red flags?

A great deal of search engine activity isn’t actually searching at all, it’s really locating stuff people have already found.

Indirect competition, it’s a subtle little bitch =)

It’s hard to imagine why Jobs would have such a grudge against Flash.  Why would he lock out the most popular piece of software in the world from the iPhone?  (Flash is more popular than any particular browser or OS)  With the early success of the iPhone 2.0 app-store, it became clear:

Had iPhone supported Flash, most of the killer apps would have been developed in Flash, and then easily ported over to the next hit phone

Many people focus on the first 2 benefits of first mover advantage: that you can have a head start in market share, and the extra time-value of money is nice too.  But what’s really the sweet spot is to develop a proprietary platform that wil be incompatible with anyone who tries to play catch-up further down the road.

To re-enforce my thesis that web “value chain is lengthening”, check out the lastest move by Meebo.  It’s a tell-tale sign of industry maturation and specialization, as products are more and more like assemblies of features developed by different parties.  Don’t immediately confuse this with the “loosely connected parts” theory though…that implies a world of data portability.  These are tightly coupled bundles branded under a single name that deliver an easily managed product experience.

I’ve always been fascinated by industry structure, and how companies position themselves along a vertical.  I think the mobile (cellular) industry structure is by far the most interesting and volatile.  It is a vertical where connectivity, hardware, OS, application/services, and content represent distinct personalities all wrestling for domination.

Why is mobile so unique? It is an industry where every major player along the vertical is both consumer-facing and consumer-monetizing.

Contrast this with the auto industry: Someone makes the screws, who sells to the guy who makes widgets, who sells to the guy who makes some larger subassembly, who then sells to the guy who makes cars.  Each point along the verticle interacts with, and monetizes only the player downstream, until the final player who faces the consumer.  The auto industry is a sequential vertical whereas mobile and content are parallel verticals.

Why are parallel verticals trickier?

Because consumers show discriminating tastes along the vertical.  Think about this: can you identify the brand of brakes in your car?  Or the make of the windshield?  Would you ever make decisions based on this information, or simply ask “which brand of cars is the safest?”  Discrimination happens at one level only: the brand of the car.  But for mobile, I know that I’m using T-Mobile service on a Motorola phone running Windows Mobile with maps from Google and pokes from Facebook.  Each of these could become a point of differentiation, a top-of-mind feature for consumers, and thus shift profits earned across the vertical.

Another source of contention is that players tend to overlap and cross typical horizontal boundaries, and thus cannibalize revenue.  A carrier provides not only connectivity (”dumb pipe”) but the voice and SMS services on top of that.  This means they are also competing with some of the application/services that could run on your phone, most notably VOIP and IM.  You could also imagine OS players overlapping with applications also, e.g., the bundling of Explorer into Windows Mobile.

Even location-aware/status services cannibalize SMS, as people often use SMS to locate each other.

Lucky for now…

Today, carriers have the greatest power along their vertical.  Handset makers are asked to build exclusive for carriers, fragmenting their product line.  A rejection can be devastating as they will be effectively shut out from their customers.  Applications and services cannot live without the implicit approval of carriers.  Verizon wouldn’t allow AIM to run on my Blackberry, and AT&T doesn’t permit VOIP on the iPhone (unless over WiFI).  Carriers are in a very priviledged position today as the gatekeeper of which products can and cannot reach the consumer.  But with a killer product, a shift in power can happen.  With the 1st generation iPhones, Apple was able to score recurring revenue from the carriers—such an arrangement is relatively unheard of before, but reflects a shift in power that will prompt heated struggle in the applications/services space.

Google is making the right bet. Computing is under going a form-factor change on two fronts, and Google must stay relevant in most as desktop computer slowly takes a back seat. The obvious of the two is the growth in mobile computing, where content providers will have to struggle against vertical interest of gatekeepers such as carriers and Apple. The smaller, but still interesting change is the transition from desktop to TV in the home.

There’s no compelling reason have a separate “computer” desk at home when computing is converging with entertainment. What we need is new form-factors of PCs (or media boxes, or consoles) and new form-factors of input devices.  Given typical usage patterns, I think the desktop form factor will disappear from residential use and split into living room + laptop/smartphone (depending on user preference).