This weekend, the 2 billionth mobile phone was connected, which is a pretty important milestone for the industry and for our very society too.

Another slightly mind buggering stat is that it took 20 years for the first billion and a mere 3 years for the next.

The world population is only 6.5 billion, so Nokia are forecasting slightly slower growth - the next billion will take around 5 1/2 years, they reckon. Meaning that sometime in 2010, around half the world’s population will own a mobile phone - and probably considerably more will have access to one. This level of technology penetration is simply unprecedented, as it bestrides both developed and developing nations. Is there anything else that comes even close?

Many great fortunes lie in wait for the entrepreneurs and investors who make the right bets. Just as many great companies will crumble away unless they accommodate the rapid changes that are already in train.

One of the old guard with perhaps the most to lose as the world changes from PC-oriented to mobile-oriented is good old Microsoft.

VC, Fred Wilson, has an interesting post speculating that MS has already used up 3 of its corporate lives and he wonders if they’ll do it a fourth time. Fred thinks that the driving force behind this is open source, but I think that’s only a symptom of the changes that are going to happen. Much more fundamental is that the mobile will become the primary way we access digital information and MS doesn’t even really have a toe-hold in mobile.

Fred calls the next phase on technology Web 2.0 but I think it’s actually Mobile 2.0 and once you get your head around that, you can start to understand that “paradigm shift” begins to look like an understatement, such as describing Everest as “quite a big hill”.

Brad Feld, another highly respected VC, inspired Fred’s post and it’s worth checking out too. Brad says that products like Vista and Office 12 will make 2006 the year of Microsoft. That may indeed be the case. However, unless they start seeing the way the mobile wind is blowing, it’s likely to be their swan song.