The MobCon War

A little over a month ago in my post 'The IT Wars' I decried the lack of a current IT War. Like it or not wars are the engine of innovation hence the old quote that in 300 years of peace the Swiss invented the Cuckoo Clock whilst in the Second World War the protagonists invented the Radar, Rockets, the Jet engine and the Atom bomb.

My earlier assessment was that the following IT Wars had been fought and the victors had prospered.

The desktop wars: Microsoft Windows vs IBM OS/2
The server wars: Mainframe vs midrange
The RDBMS wars: Oracle vs Ingres
The browser wars: Internet Explorer vs Netscape
The Search Engine Wars: Google vs Yahoo

In my defence the focus of my original post was commercial IT but rereading the post in light of the second reading, and also that fact that on occasion my blog has strayed into the MobCon space I figured it was time to put the record straight and comment on the current war at hand.

To paraphrase the Excapite blog: The MobCon Wars. If you want to understand the MobCon I'd recommend some essential reading at http://excapite.wordpress.com/

There are lots of protagonists originating from the technology, telcos and media fields but I believe that this war will be fought most bitterly between Apple and Google. Up until a couple of years ago these two tech giants seemed to be peacefully co-existing and focussed more on attacking Redmond. Eric Schmidt even had a seat at the Apple high table. There are even rumours that the two companies has a no poaching of staff agreement.

Judging by the recent second hand quotes attributed to Steve Jobs in a recent Town Hall meeting it would seem that relations are somewhat strained between the two tech goliaths. He appears to be somewhat aggrieved that the Mountain View mob have strayed onto his turf with the Nexus One and potential Chrome based tablet whilst Apple to date have stayed out of the Search Engine field. Nothing like a bit of siege mentality to get the minds focussed and steel your troops for combat.

You can place your bets on the eventual winner but if I was a betting man I'd have to put my money on Apple. After all they're a company I choose to spend my hard earned cash with. When's the last time you bought anything from Google?