multidimensional, get it?

I was watching this Bloomberg video the other day featuring Shawn Carolan, the venture capitalist who backed the Siri electronic personal assistant startup then sold it to Apple. His was the closest I’d heard to a technical explanation of how Siri works and it surprised me because it sounded a lot like technology I remembered from years ago at Excite, the long-defunct search engine.  Please look at the video and then meet me in the next paragraph.  The part that excited me (no pun intended) is about four minutes in.

Okay, he said they used linguistic techniques to map blocks of words against 10 possible domains of expertise to figure out what the heck you are asking Siri to do, with the real breakthrough being treating the entire user question or order as a single linguistic unit.

Now let’s jump back to 1994.  Eighteen years ago the search engine technology standard was set by Alta Vista, which spun out of Digital Equipment Corporation. Alta Vista pioneered web indexing with spiders dragging back web pages and it pioneered keyword searches. But if a keyword wasn’t present, Alta Vista would never return the web page you really needed because Alta Vista wasn’t smart enough.

Today the search engine standard is of course Google which uses PageRank to measure relevance by putting higher in the search results those pages that are linked to by more other pages.  Adding to this (yes, I know I’m over-simplifying — feel free to correct me) Google knows a lot about synonyms and how word meaning changes in different contexts — basic linguistic tools that were probably out of Alta Vista’s reach simply because of the processing power required.

And then there was Excite, which was completely different. When I first visited the company in 1994 it was called ArchiText and was six Stanford students operating from their Los Altos garage. I helped them find their first customer and their first venture capitalist, Steve Coit of Charles River Ventures. Vinod came along later.

Most of the ArchiText boys were semantic systems majors and they took a very different technical approach to search than did Alta Vista or that other up-and-coming search engine, Yahoo, which in those days did the task the old fashioned way — by hand.

ArchiText used spiders, too, and built its own web index, but from the start the company was dedicated to finding useful search results even if they didn’t include any search terms from the original user query — seemingly an enormous job.  Google does some of that through its elaborate algorithm, mentioned above, but Google’s technique is for the most part hard coded and brute force while ArchiText’s was very different and, well, elegant.

Here’s how the ArchiText (later Excite) search engine worked. Every query was stripped to its significant words — subjects, objects, verbs and adjectives — then each query became a vector in a multidimensional space with each unique word being a dimension.  “How do space rockets stay in orbit when they are flying through space?” would become a vector string one unit long for each of those words but two units long for the word “space.”  This bit of semantic DNA was then mapped against an index of millions of web pages that had all been similarly converted to multidimensional vectors.

Finding the most relevant results then became a simple matter of grabbing the N vectors (web pages) nearest to the query vector in that multidimensional space.  It was quick, scalable, concentrated the processing load on the indexing where it didn’t bog down retrieval, and could reliably return pages like “Why satellites fall from the sky” that might answer the question even though none of the same words were used.

Compare that to the description of Siri from the Bloomberg video.  Siri takes the entire query as a single block and maps it against a corpus composed of 10 domains of expertise looking for a fit, or perhaps for the best fit.

Technically it sounds darned similar to me, but then I’m forever condemned to remember old crap like this.

In the long run PageRank was more useful to the real world, Excite got sucked into @Home and the whole mess blew up with the dot-com meltdown, but not before all this technology was patented — patents owned today by Excite@Home’s creditors, which surprised me given that the original inventor, Graham Spencer, now works at Google.

Those old Excite patents, while nearing the end of their lives, could turn out to be very valuable to, say, a Google trying to compete with Siri on Android or even to an Apple trying to defend Siri from competitors.

I expect we’ll see those patents change hands sometime soon.

I was speaking recently at a software company very interested in mobile apps. One of their concerns had to do with which operating systems to support.  Should they do them all?  Just a couple? My advice was that three’s a crowd.

Technical markets tend to divide like bettors at the racetrack where five percent win, 10 percent break even while 85 percent lose. Turning these numbers on their head and applying them to mobile OS revenue, IOS (iPhone, iPad, iGizmo to be named later) will generate 85 percent, Android 10 percent (because it is Open Source and free) leaving only five percent max for mobile OS number three, which could be Blackberry or Windows Phone 7 but can’t be both.

Notice this is all about revenue.  I’m not saying Android won’t have more phones in use than Apple, just that Apple will make a lot more money from its phones.

Since Microsoft feels it can’t afford to miss the mobile transition, they’ll do anything to hold at least the third spot, which is why I expect Redmond to eventually acquire RIM. That would actually be a better than usual deal for Microsoft. RIM has (residual and fading) market share as well as incredible talent at its Waterloo, Ontario HQ, not to mention a bootload of cash. What they don’t have is a clue, which is why they need Microsoft, which is clueless, too, but will at least provide desperate new leadership, mass, and marketing clout.

Hey, I think that was my first prediction for 2012!

Another option for Microsoft would be to embrace Android and reposition Windows Phone as a shell, making Android apps look and function like Windows apps. This is not as stupid as it sounds. Thanks to its aggressive legal department, Microsoft already makes more money from Android than does Google, so Android’s success can be seen as Microsoft’s success if you squint a little. Microsoft could specialize in Android services where Google might be letting users down a bit and the Microsoft/Android Application Store could sell apps for both OS variants, undercutting Google.

That’s prediction #2: If Microsoft doesn’t buy RIM they’ll license Android.

If they are really on their game Microsoft will do both (buy RIM and license Android) which would be a true game changer.

This potentially leaves a little room for other candidates for mobile OS position #3, but I’m at a loss for a good business case for even trying. Consider, for example, Intel’s new mobile OS project called Tizen, which replaces the failed Meego.

Tizen looks to me like a bad bet. Intel even championing a mobile OS against IOS and Android is spitting in the wind. The best that Intel can hope is to grab third place, which would still take a miracle.

Is a potential five percent market share worth Intel’s time?  I don’t think so.

Prediction #3: Tizen will fail in 2012.

Metropolitan newspapers in Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and other places, seeking to survive, are embracing tablet editions to the point of marketing their own e-readers, most of which seem to be Android tablets. It’s a noble effort to avoid extinction but I’m here to tell you it won’t work. Private label tablet computers are a bad idea for newspapers.

The reason I can make this statement with such conviction is because I once tried to do it myself. The year was 1993 when I convinced International Data Group (my employer at the time) to create an electronic magazine about Microsoft. We called it Microsquish.

The magazine was intended to be distributed weekly in PDF format over this new thing they called the Internet. At more than a megabyte in size Microsquish was bigger than most ISPs at the time would allow as an e-mail attachment, so we had to find another way to send it. Gopher and Fetch were considered.  It was possible we could have done it as a downloadable web document in HTML, but that standard was only two years old and unproven while PDF was working fine. Remember this was pre-Netscape.

We soon had a magazine and a document format but no means of distributing a file so big to so many people (we were hoping for 100,000 subscribers).  Understand we were proposing to somehow deliver over the Internet more than 100 gigabytes per week, a task that at that time could easily have taken more than a week just to accomplish, killing the whole idea of a weekly publication.

So I invented a way to do it. My delivery system, called Pronto, may have been the first Content Distribution Network. It was a Java application intended to run on hundreds or thousands of servers all over the world. We built it and it worked. Pronto could still teach the world a thing or two about reliable delivery, and it scaled beautifully.

But how would people read our magazine? Like any PDF it could be read on computer screens, but to take advantage of PostScript’s beautiful typography and vector graphics it made sense, too, to allow people to print their copy of Microsquish.  Better still, why not avoid the PC entirely and build a Pronto client into a cheap color printer?  That way the paper could be printed overnight and be ready for reading at breakfast.

I visited Canon in Japan and asked what it would cost for a custom inkjet printer with a built-in Pronto client if IDG took charge of actually distributing the printers to Microsquish subscribers.  Canon said the cost of such printers would be… free!  But in order to close the deal I would have to find publications beyond just Microsquish, they said.  I had inadvertently built a publishing system that should be leveraged, they explained. Do a co-marketing deal with the New York Times to gain some real volume, Canon suggested. They wanted to build a lot of free printers.

Well the Times wasn’t interested, nobody was.  As usual, I was 18 years or more ahead of my time, so Microsquish was never born.

The reason Canon was willing to provide the printers for free was so they could make their profit on ink cartridges, which is where the money has always been for those low-end printers. And a Pronto printer was especially attractive to Canon both because of its high volume and because the Pronto client could be adapted to automatically reorder ink as needed.  Cool, eh?

Now jump to today.  The wan and limping Chicago Tribune wants to make its own Android tablet reader, which it thinks it might be able to give away or sell to subscribers for a small price. I don’t think the economics of such a device work without consumables. They need the equivalent of ink cartridge sales for the numbers to work out, but tablets don’t use ink.

These newspapers like to think they’ll get a sweetheart deal from the big cell companies but they won’t.  Everyone who would read an electronic edition already has a mobile phone company.

Maybe the Trib and those other papers can white label a $199 or $299 Android tablet, but I doubt that will generate enough sustainable subscriptions to support an electronic edition. There’s just too much work for too little reward.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to be wrong about this.  I looked seriously into doing my own Android tablet but it made no business sense. Not enough has really changed since 1993. We’re still ahead of our time.

Which is why I’ve decided to do my own Android phone, instead, rather than a tablet. Now that makes more sense.

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Nortel Networks, the bankrupt Canadian telecom company, came that much closer to disappearing completely yesterday with the cash sale of its portfolio of 6000 patents for $4.5 billion to a consortium of companies including Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion (RIM), and Sony. The bidding, which began with a $900 million offer from Google, went far higher than most observers expected and only ended, I’m guessing, when Google realized that Apple and its partners had deeper pockets and would have paid anything to win. This transaction is a huge blow to Google’s Android platform, which was precisely the consortium’s goal.

Google is the youngest of these companies and has probably the smallest patent portfolio, most of which isn’t mobile or telecom related. This puts Google and Android at a legal disadvantage and explains the 45 patent infringement suits that one analyst says Google in presently facing in the mobile area alone.

Google would have preferred to win the auction, but with the consortium sitting on more than $100 billion in cash, the outcome came down to determination, not resources. Google stayed in it only long enough to make sure of the consortium’s intentions and to make the purchase more painful for them, if that mattered.

It certainly mattered to Google, because that $4.5 billion number will be at the heart of the inevitable anti-trust lawsuit Google will file almost immediately. Every good anti-trust lawyer in America just cancelled his or her July 4th holiday to prepare their pitch for Google, which will probably claim Restraint of Trade as well.

Given that the courts will shortly be involved, Google can probably operate unfettered for another 2-3 years, during which they’ll try to build their own mobile patent portfolio. Google may well be able to use the courts to slow the actual Nortel transaction, too, according to my lawyer friends.

So the “Android is dead” story here is way premature.

In the long run, remember, Google will probably be able to use its legal strategy to force the consortium to at least license some or all of the patents. They’ll get a royalty from Google, I suppose, and thus benefit from Android’s success, but then Google is unlikely to be completely deterred, either.

The story everyone seems to be missing here is who gets what in this consortium deal? Most journalists and bloggers seem to assume the winners will all share equally in the IP spoils. But I have people who know people and the word I am hearing it that’s not the way the consortium works at all.

Some consortium members get patents, some get royalties, and some just get freedom from having to pay royalties.

Notice Nokia isn’t in the consortium? The Finnish company is apparently covered by Microsoft, tying Nokia even more firmly to Windows Phone.

Here’s the consortium participation as I understand it. RIM and Ericsson together put up $1.1 billion with Ericsson getting a fully paid-up license to the portfolio while RIM, as a Canadian company like Nortel, gets a paid-up license plus possibly some carry forward operating losses from Nortel, which has plenty of such losses to spare. For RIM the deal might actually have a net zero cost after tax savings, which the Canadian business press hasn’t yet figured out.

Microsoft and Sony put up another $1 billion.

There is a reportedly a side deal for about $400 million with EMC that has the storage company walking with sole ownership of an unspecified subset of the Nortel patents.

Finally Apple put up $2 billion for outright ownership of Nortel’s Long Term Evolution (4G) patents as well as another package of patents supposedly intended to hobble Android.

At the end of the day this deal isn’t about royalties. It is about trying to kill Android.

Note — Here’s a pretty good account from Reuters of the Nortel patent auction. You’ll notice they don’t include the participation breakdown of the winning bid (who gets what) that so far appears no place but here.

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Apple’s announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function — killing Microsoft.

Here is the money line from Jobs yesterday: “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device – just like an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch. We’re going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud.”

Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even further and say our data is the computer.

This redefines digital incumbency. The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn’t about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.

What this requires from Apple is a bold move that Microsoft would never make: Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows. He isn’t beating Windows, he’s making Windows inconsequential.

Having been shown the way by Apple, I expect Google to shortly do the same thing, adding automated backup, synchronization and migration to Android and Chrome.

Both companies will be grabbing for data, claiming territory, and leaving Microsoft alone to defend a desktop that will soon cease to exist.

And what happens once all our data is in that iCloud, is there any easy way to get it back out? Nope. It’s in there forever and we are captive customers — trapped more completely than Microsoft ever imagined.

Apple and Google will compete like crazy for our data because once they have it we’ll be their customers forever.

This transition will take at most two hardware generations and we’re talking mobile generations, which means three years, total.

With no mobile market share to speak of and Windows 8 not due until 2013, Microsoft is likely to be too late to the party, with much of Redmond’s market cap transplanted eventually to Apple and Google.

Some will say this is unlikely because of Microsoft’s grip on enterprise sales, but consumers have been leading the IT market for the last decade and the mobile transition will only accelerate this trend.

The quicker Microsoft can turn itself into IBM the better for Redmond, because that appears to be their only chance.

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Nokia today announced that the Finnish cellphone company is choosing Windows 7 Phone as the operating system for its future smart phones. It’s not a surprising move given that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop came from Microsoft and it’s not even that risky a move given that the alternative was a slow but certain death for Nokia smart phones running Symbian and Meego. Sure Nokia could have gone with Android, but Google has less at risk than Microsoft so Redmond had much more to offer. The only real question here is whether Nokia can make the new strategy a success?  I think they can, but there is only one way to do it — by rushing the net.

I’m no tennis player, but my understanding of this tactic (rushing the net) is that you hit deep into your opponent’s territory using a lot of topspin to make the ball harder to return then run right up to the net and attempt to slam his return shot into the forecourt while your opponent is still in the backcourt and unable to reach the ball. The Nokia version of this tactic would be to introduce the best-ever Windows 7 Phone (faster processor, better screen, expanded services, competitive price) then simultaneously introduce  another line of Windows 7 phones that have 80 percent of that capability for 20 percent of the price.

Nokia has already lost the elites but they have to make a credible showing toward the top of the market to stay in the game at all. This is one of those instances, though, where the company really can make it up in volume. They have to essentially cannibalize their own feature phone business to save the smart phone business.

Think about it. The life expectancy of a mobile phone is 18 months, meaning phone users are literally forced to change on a regular basis, often switching platforms in the process. Even buying another phone from the same vendor is a decision because the phones change so much in that time. That’s what makes the mobile handset business such a bloodbath where Motorola can be on top one minute with its Razr then a dog the next with the same phone. Phones are getting ever more powerful, too, thanks to Moore’s Law and the many cloud services coming online. So a Nokia decision to lean-into smart phones at the expense of feature phones is really just a decision to accelerate the inevitable.

Feature phones have one generation left to live. Three years from now every mobile phone will be a smart phone.

To embrace this, however, means going aggressively down-market. Apple has done this with the $49 iPhone 3GS. Nokia needs to do the same thing only even more aggressively. They need a $29 smart phone.

Here is the transition we are likely to see. Cheaper smart phones are coming. There was a story just this week about Apple announcing a cheaper smart phone this summer. I can see it now: at the WWDC in June Apple will announce the expected multi-core, 4G, international-ready, whiter-then-white, 1.2-GHz iPhone 5, but the “one more thing” will be a repackaged, smaller form-factor, $29 iPhone 3GS. Nokia has to not only have a response to this move by Apple, they must preempt it with an earlier announcement of their own.

Nokia (and Microsoft’s) survival in the phone market is dependent on staking out the lower end of the market where people buy on price as much as features and brand loyalty is less of an issue. Apple is heading there and Android is there already. Only by rushing the net — by following the time-honored Microsoft technique of throwing bodies and staggering amounts of money at a problem in a market-changing way — can these companies remain relevant in the mobile space.

But they have only one chance to make it work and they’ll have to take that chance before June.

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I want to make a small point here about this week’s Windows Phone 7 launch from Microsoft. Now you can take this with a grain of salt given that I was an iPhone user until I switched this summer to Blackberry for my Startup Tour. So I am not exactly unbiased. But is it just me or are you, too, having a hard time seeing the $400 million that Microsoft claims to be spending on this product launch?

Redmond spent $100 million launching Windows 95, a number that set something of a record for its time and stood for long as the standard amount to spend if big companies were trying to make a point based mainly on the depth of their pockets. For Windows 7 (not Windows 7 Phone) I recall Microsoft set a new record, blowing-through $200 million. So when I read that they’d be spending $400 million on Windows Phone 7 — now this was something I had to see. I expected to find a Microsoft billboard on my garage door.

Not yet.

Given inflation (remember that?) $400 million doesn’t buy what it used to, but I still expected Windows Phone 7 to be as omnipresent as Windows 95 or Windows 7. And it’s out there, but the effort simply doesn’t feel like $400 million worth of marketing oomph.

But maybe this just isn’t the kind of oomph we’re used to, I thought. Maybe Microsoft is putting half or more of the money into subsidizing the handsets. If that were the case, though, wouldn’t the new Windows Phone 7 phones be cheaper than they are?

From what I have read these new phones are all around $200, which is the going rate for high-end smart phones these days on two-year contracts. So they are being subsidized, certainly by the carriers and perhaps by Microsoft, but the companies are just matching the competition: they aren’t trying to buy market share with lower prices.

I think that’s a mistake. I think lower handset prices right now are exactly what Windows Phone 7 needs to have a chance of building market share. Maybe that’s what Microsoft intended but the carriers are keeping the prices up by taking the Microsoft subsidies for themselves.  If that’s so then the carriers are betting on Windows Phone 7′s eventual failure.

Maybe Microsoft had to give the carriers those subsidies in order to get enthusiastic adoption of yet another smart phone platform. This could all be more or less out of Microsoft’s control, much like getting Matt Lauer to correctly pronounce Steve Ballmer’s name on the TODAY Show.

How can you mispronounce a name like “Ballmer?” Lauer can, but I can’t even phonetically replicate his effort here, it was so strange (and he did it twice).

Microsoft is in trouble right out of the gate because the rule of thumb is you need two or more clearly superior points of differentiation in order to gain share from an underdog position in a technology market. I don’t think Microsoft has two.

Microsoft is counting on the innate newness of Windows Phone 7, on its clever streamlined interface, on what Redmond believes — really believes (I know these guys and they love their product) — to be superior performance. That’s plenty of points of differentiation only some of them aren’t real.

Microsoft isn’t Apple. Even Microsoft knows that. So the value of “new” isn’t very much in this case. It didn’t work for the Kin, did it? It didn’t work for Bob, either. New never works if it doesn’t also mean “better,” and this doesn’t — at least not yet.

While Windows Phone 7 may or may not be technically superior, it isn’t so much superior that I can make a judgement that will stick. These phones aren’t out yet, nobody has really used them, and they haven’t been proven on a network (remember Antennagate at Apple?). So Windows Phone 7 may be dramatically superior but who would know? Is the sizzle alone enough to keep us from buying or renewing an iPhone or Android phone while waiting for the Windows Phone 7 handsets to ship? I doubt it.

Then there’s the App Store, or sparseness of it. iPhone and Android have between them about 250,000 more native applications available than does Windows Phone 7. Ironically Microsoft is the underdog here, fighting uphill againsst its own favorite strategy of market dominance. I don’t doubt their heart or determination to do so, but this is new territory for Redmond and I’m not sure they can make it.

So if I was Microsoft and had $400 million marketing dollars to throw at this new platform, I’d make every phone cost $99 or less. I’d bull my way into the market through sheer financial muscle, sending signals all the way down to my Mom in Arkansas that there’s a new sheriff in town.

Only Microsoft didn’t do that.

Maybe they couldn’t force such pricing on the carriers. More likely they are holding price cuts in reserve to be used only if needed — if the market doesn’t otherwise respond to what Microsoft sees as its clear advantages.

I can tell you right now that’s a mistake. If the goal is to get consumers to wait before buying a phone there will have to be some economic component of that motivation in the form of dramatically lower prices.

Having not started with lower prices from the very first minute, Microsoft may well have already lost the battle, no matter how good the phones actually are.

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Near the eve of Apple’s tablet announcement, I’d like to turn my 2010 predictive eye again to the mobile space where, as my title suggests, there are only three software players that matter — Apple, Google, and RIM (Blackberry).

But wait a minute, isn’t Nokia the big Kahuna in this space and aren’t they right now suing the heck out of Apple? Yes, but that’s an act of desperation, a stalling tactic intended just to slow Apple down or, possibly, send some useful license revenue from Cupertino to Finland. It doesn’t change the inevitable.

So-called “feature phones” are going away, to be replaced within two product cycles (three years, tops) entirely by smart phones driven by mobile app stores and the need for carriers to generate additional revenue. It’s not like you’ll even be able to find a feature phone to buy.

The smart phone marketplace will consolidate around three operating systems — Android, Blackberry, and OS X. Though there will be some ups and down in the market and the complete transition will take longer to complete than my usual 12-month timeline, Symbian, Windows Phone, and every other smart phone OS that isn’t from Apple, Google, or RIM, are likely to die or be reduced to insignificance.

None of these platforms expect to die, but that’s the way it is with these things. You don’t expect to lose until you’ve lost, generally.

On some level Nokia even thinks it still has a chance to win the war, but it doesn’t.

Nokia has faith in its very popular cross-platform application development environment, Qt, which it acquired in 2008 with the $153 million acquisition of Norwegian company Trolltech, father of Qt. Nokia sees Qt as its secret sauce — a potent weapon against Apple.

Qt, like any of a number of 4GLs can write once and deploy a lot of places. Where Qt is different from the other 4GLs (in the mind of Nokia at least) is that it manages to do what it does without killing app performance, probably because Qt began as a mobile product and mobile apps have to be lean and fast.

So Qt is growing up at just the time applications and OSes are growing down, thanks to OS X and the iPhone. Qt has made notable progress supporting 3D apps and a huge variety of processors, chipsets, and GPUs. They showed at CES the same apps running from the same source on a ton of different hardware platforms from handsets to desktops to set top boxes. And now Nokia has reportedly done the unthinkable, which is to rewrite Maemo, its Linux, in Qt.

Meanwhile, Apple has been rolling forward with its PA Semi strategy, the first fruit of which we’ll apparently see announced next week. I sense that Apple is headed toward a family of devices from handhelds to servers all linked to a cloud and ostensibly running the same OS. Apple is mining the ARM ecosystem for this move in addition to its own PA Semi extensions.

Nokia thinks that, through either Qt or various legal moves (or both), it can slow Apple’s mobile juggernaut. They won’t, and here’s why.

Apple hires the meanest lawyers it can find, paying extra bucks for that “kick them for good measure” attitude. I know a company that had long legal battles with both Microsoft and Apple and they said Apple’s legal team was far worse than Microsoft’s, hands down. So while Nokia’s appeal to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to punish Apple, is an act of desperation, Apple’s similar response is just the way they do these things.

This legal situation is going to get uglier and uglier but in the end it will be settled with patent cross-licensing, no monetary damages or license fees, and Nokia feeling relieved to get out of the negotiating room alive.

This will happen, I believe, because Apple doesn’t really give a damn about Qt or Nokia. They care much more about Google and Microsoft.

Nokia is going to fail in using Qt and Symbian to compete with Android or iPhone application frameworks because Nokia just doesn’t understand software. Nokia is a hardware company that does software and hardware companies aren’t fighting this new war, they just build the weapons.

Remember Apple is a software company that sells its products in an expensive hardware box.

Ultimately (more than 12 months from now) there will be a shakeout and Nokia will drop Symbian and even Maemo in favor of Google’s Android and Nokia custom apps, UI, and hardware.

Meanwhile Microsoft will cut its rumored (and incredibly expensive) iPhone search deal with Apple, then it will introduce Windows Phone 7, which will fail to gain market traction for Redmond. Microsoft will ultimately align with Apple to avoid the embarrassment of working with Google, but this alignment will be solely for mobile.

That is unless Microsoft buys RIM and then doesn’t screw it up.

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Dag nabbit I had hoped to get away without having to write a predictions column this year, but no such luck. Look for that one tomorrow. Tonight, of course, there’s Google’s Nexus One smart phone to write about. Is it an iPhone killer? Hardly. And that’s not even the point.

Google’s Nexus One is a very nice smart phone as far as I can tell. I only read what you read and I haven’t yet played with one, but a couple nice folks who were on TWiT with me this week have tried it and liked it a lot, especially the screen. Yet many of the stories I’ve read today have presented this product introduction as a seminal break between Apple and Google with one trying to kill the other. Not even close.

Apple is very happy with its iPhone sales, thanks, and those are unlikely to be hurt much, if at all, by the Nexus One. Not that the Nexus One can’t be a huge success for Google. But here are the points everyone seems to be missing: 1) there is plenty of room in the mobile market for both Apple and Google, and; 2) this product introduction really marks the ultimate decline and fall of so-called “feature phones” and the rise to dominance of smart phones. Within two years there will be no more feature phones, at least not in the U.S.

The real losers today, then, are makers of feature phones and, maybe, Microsoft, which has the most vulnerable smart phone platform in Windows Phone.

The Nexus One introduction, coming on top of the iPhone, marks the true ascendence of smart phones as an alternative platform to desktops and notebooks. No, you can’t survive on a smart phone alone, the days of one computing device per person ended long ago.

But this does mark the beginning of the smart phone shakeout, when the industry matures and inevitably drops to no more than three viably competitive smart phone platforms. So just as you have Windows, Mac, and some form of ‘nix fighting it out for desktops and notebooks, so too we’ll shortly have three major mobile platforms to choose from.

iPhone and Android will be here for the long haul with the question being which of Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile, or Blackberry will die?

What’s your guess? My guess is that Blackberry will be the third standard, Nokia will eventually leave Symbian for Android, and Microsoft will buy Palm but then screw it up, losing its position almost entirely in the mobile client space where smart phones will soon dominate, selling up to a billion units per year.

Hey this did turn out to be a predictions column after all!

More predictions tomorrow.

A couple times per year the New York Times calls me up asking for an Op-Ed column on some technology topic.  I don’t know how they found me but I’ve been writing these pieces since 1995.  I think they call because I’m good at meeting tight deadlines.  Lord knows that if there was a piece I actually wanted to get in the Times (my idea, not theirs) I have no confidence that I could get them to run it.  Op-Ed at the Times — at least to me — is a sort of black box.

Here’s the column they asked for on Google’s Chrome OS: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/opinion/13cringely.html

The opinions expressed, as always, are ruthlessly my own.