Most of the press coverage of Microsoft recently has obviously been focused on their on-off pursuit of the coy Yahoo!. Followed by lots of analyses of what Redmond needs to do now to catch up in Search and Advertising.

Mr Ballmer has also spoken a lot about how they understand that software is moving to cloud based services and that they are responding to this too.

But, as readers of MobHappy will know, the cloud is only half the future.

The other half is that the mobile will become the most important digital device on a number of different levels; more people have web connected mobiles than connected PCs - and that’s already happened; outside N America and Europe, the PC itself is going to be either leapfrogged or annihilated, which will profoundly affect the way that digital data is consumed everywhere; and in the words of my ongoing mantra, the mobile will do to the PC, what the PC did to the mainframe*.

This means that mobile needs to be central to Microsoft’s strategy if they are to have a future and a lack of success in this area means that their current problems are going to seem trivial in comparison.

Which is why their current sales on Windows Mobile must be worrying them more that they’re letting on, with their recent admirably jaunty “What? Problem? Us?” press conference, where they admitted missing their target by 10%, or some 2 million units in real money. However you spin this - and they tried with this great quote “It sounds like a large number of units, but actually, it’s less than about a month’s worth of a run-rate.” - it’s bad news.

There is some comfort in the rising market share - currently at 13% of smartphones. But let’s just look at that. According to AdMob Metrics which measures consumption of mobile web pages in the wild, yes 13% of pages were viewed worldwide on Windows Mobile devices, out of a potential 3.5 Billion. But already iPhone has a 5% share and don’t forget these Metrics (and Windows Mobile results) were before iPhone 3G kicked in and before it was available in so many more territories, which surely must take a chunk out of the future sales. They’ll also have to contend with Symbian going open source (who already dominate the market with a 58% share based on these Metrics), the rise and rise of the Crackberry by the besuited amongst us and possibly the launch of Android, although I’m not sure how influential that’s going to be now.

It actually gets even bleaker than this. As I observed above, some of the great changes in mobile are going to be led by markets where the mobile is already, and will continue to be, the primary digital device. But outside the US, Windows Mobile is nothing. Look again at the Metrics and while Windows has a healthy slug of 27% of the US, in the other top markets for mobile web consumption, it’s insignificant, with the best success coming in the UK, where they have a measly 4% share**.

I don’t wish to add to their troubles and certainly take no pleasure in observing this. However, it’s far more important that Microsoft gets their mobile strategy sorted out than worrying about Search - as it’s no less than a matter of medium-to-long-term survival. I’d suggest that Windows Mobile probably isn’t going to be the answer and they need to think of a radical and brave new direction to assure their future in a world where the mobile is rampant.

* If you’re not a regular reader, please don’t bother to point out that the PC is irreplaceable for tasks like writing a document, preparing a presentation or editing video. If you dock your mobile into a monitor and keyboard combo (using today’s technology), you don’t need a PC.

** There may be other markets where Windows Mobile might be doing better and please let me know in a comment if you have access to knowledge that I don’t. But overall, I don’t think this is unrepresentative of the state Windows today.

Years ago, I read a scifi novel (can’t remember who by) where the author referred to an all-too-common crime inflicted on women. Saddo blokes would call them on video phones (while blocking their caller ID), with the camera focused on their genitalia and sort of gig about a little.

It actually sounds pretty harmless, albeit very irritating, if it happened to you a lot. But perhaps, on first consideration no more than say, a persistent window replacement sales person calling repeatedly.

I read this story this morning about a poor women who this is happening to now, in another case of scifi proving to be an accurate portrayal of the future. She’s been receiving pics of a penis sent anonymously to her phone. The thing is, her husband was killed about a month ago (in a completely unrelated traffic incident) and she understandably finds these photos really upsetting.

A Penectomy should put a stop the guy doing it, if that doesn’t sound too extreme. No, I don’t think it does, on reflection - you can’t waggle your bits if they’re not there anymore and perhaps we need some new creative solutions for new creative types of crime.

One of the Autumn events that I’m speaking at and is shaping up to be very interesting is Informa’s Mobile Web Europe. Lots of great speakers and officially a hot topic these days - at long last.

In fact, now that even mighty media organisations like the BBC (”Boom Times Ahead for the Mobile Web”) are starting to cover it more seriously, I think we’re going to see a frenzy of coverage like we saw back in 1995/6 for the PC web. It’s been a bit of a puzzle for me in the last few years that usage of the mobile web is higher than the PC web back in those days and yet the media has been curiously silent on the subject.

However, once the media weighs in, we’re going to see explosive growth. It’s already growing at 100% year on year according to some recent tracking we did at AdMob, but there’s plenty of potential yet.

One of the ways to get mobile is to set up a .mobi site and as part of the conference, The .mobi Advisory Group are sponsoring the ILovetheMobileWeb Awards, which will showcase the very best .mobi mobile websites. So if you have a whizzy, wonderful or wacky .mobi site, get entering (free) before 22nd August.

You might find this previous post useful, where we looked at 10 Rules for Mobile Website Creation.

And I hope to see you win an award.

Sometimes it’s nice to have your gutfeel confirmed and Comscore/M:Metrics’ latest findings do just that. They report that map usage is growing far more quickly in mobile that it is online; 82% on the US and 49% growth in Europe against single digit growth via the PC.

This feel right as the map on the mobile is a very cool tool indeed and naturally lends itself to personal navigation. I also think that the future direction of location based marketing is probably going to be around popping ads up on maps as they are viewed on mobile devices, although we’ll have to see how effective they might be. But this methodology certainly overcomes a lot of the other inherent issues surrounding LBM.

But before we get too excited about mapping on mobile though, let’s just also note that it’s very easy to achieve high percentage growth on anything from a low base. Today only about 8% of mobile owners use maps in the US and only 3% in Europe. This compares with usage online of around 45%, so we have a while to wait before the real potential of mobile, as opposed to PC, mapping can be judged.

However, if I had to make a bet on the future on one or the other, I’d say that mobile maps will be the clear longterm winner.

I just read about a new service on SlashDot, which sounds like it might be pretty useful, although I find the positioning strange - maybe a cultural thing.

The service is called SlyDial and you use it to connect you straight to someone’s voice mail, when you don’t want to speak to them in person. To use the service, you dial 267-SLYDIAL (267-759-3425) and after the prompt, dial the person’s mobile number for whom you want to leave a message. This call then goes straight through to their voice mail, without ringing the phone itself - although one SlashDotee claims that it makes the phone ring once. I can’t try it out as it only works in the US, so any feedback would be cool.

The service is ad-funded, with callers having to listen to an ad before getting connected to the voicemail, with an option to upgrade to a paid-for version at 15 cents a call or $4.95 per month for unlimited use.

As far as the positioning is concerned, I find it a little strange that it’s about “sly”, which in British English implies that it’s sneaky or underhand in some way, unlike say, “cunning”, which has a similar meaning, albeit with slightly more admirable qualities. And many of the use-cases that they suggest do indeed sound “sly”, such as a student phoning home but not wanting to actually talk to their parents, or when someone has blown $5,000 gambling and wants to tell their wife to hold off making a mortgage payment!

To me, this is a little like a credit card company promoting itself by suggesting that it makes it easier for you to buy online porn or carry on drinking yourself stupid when you run out of cash. Yes, these are true and many people do use credit cards for these kinds of purposes. But why sully the image of the service for more mainstream users? Human nature will ensure that every nefarious use for a product and service will be discovered and spread virally anyway. I’m sure that bank note issuers didn’t think about how their product could be used to consume cocaine or hammer manufacturers anticipate that they were making murder weapons for some people.

There are other use-cases they go into and arguably far better and surely more realistic examples of how it might be used - such as not wanting to bother someone with a call, but wanting to make sure they get a message, such as confirming a meeting. Personally, I’d do it by email the day before, but there are certainly some people who prefer voicemails, especially in corporate America.

So, while I can see that for some people this kind of service might be interesting some of the time, I do wonder about the marketing and execution. Or maybe I’m being too straight and serious today. What do you think?

As with all these sorts of service though, the biggest challenge is in promoting itself. Getting the word out in the first place is about 5% of the battle. Getting people to use it again and again is the huge challenge, as they must remember that it exists at all when they have a potential need for it and then remember how to use it - or the phone number in this case. These aspects are really, really hard.

I wish them all the best, of course, despite my slight reservations.

I was speaking on a panel a few weeks back, which was an odd mix of folk really, so it was hard for the Chair Lady to involve everyone and maintain some kind of coherence to the discussion. But one of my fellow panelists was some kind of sales person for a tech infrastructure vendor. I won’t embarrass him (he did a great job of that himself) by naming him and his company, but he was the kind of person who couldn’t leave aside his sales pitch and either look at a bigger picture or actually answer the questions he was asked.

At one point he came up with a startlingly naive statement along the lines of:

- he certainly didn’t want advertising on his phone
- therefore no one else in the world would

I assume his little tirade would have been a different if his company had been in the ad business somehow. But even if they weren’t, it was an astonishing position to take in public against an industry that indirectly, pays his salary. I mean, how many servers and high end boxes would his company sell without online advertising, even if extending that principle into mobile advertising proved too intellectually complex for the poor chap?

The fact is that advertising is the primary commercial engine that drives the PC web and it will become as important on the mobile - indeed, it’s already going that way. If you try and imagine the web without advertising, you’re looking at a world where you pay for every time you search. There’s no free email. No Skype and IM. No media online. And no free services like Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn and many of the other, everyday things we take for granted. The web would be completely different space today and would have been unlikely to develop much beyond where we were in 1996 - an amazingly primitive and not really very interesting place to be, although Wikipedia still may have happened, so not entirely useless.

I was thinking about this Dorkface when reading about 4th Screen Advertising’s new survey about how consumers view mobile advertising when embedded in video. [Bias alert - 4th Screen are in a similar business to AdMob]. The survey was conducted among 600 consumers on O2 Active and sought to understand how they reacted to 15 second pre-roll adverts run before free video content, with age and gender targetting.

Now let’s just remind ourselves that this type of advertising is very intrusive - essentially, you are forcing the consumer to watch something, after which they get their reward of the free content. So unlike say a banner ad, you can’t possibly argue that people can ignore it if they’re not interested - they have no choice but to watch it. Therefore, it wouldn’t be very surprising if lots of people didn’t like this format, while finding other less intrusive formats acceptable.

On the other hand, the social contract is very clear - in other words, it’s very obvious that the free content is provided explicitly in exchange for the consumer’s attention for a short period of time. This is a little different to most advertising where this contract isn’t spelt out in quite the same way - a banner ad might be shown, but it’s not stated that the content or service provider can only produce this by showing ads. It’s implied, for sure, and most people understand this if asked. But I wonder how many make the direct connection with more subtle ad formats?

Anyway, back to the survey. An overwhelming 88% of respondents said that they were happy with this form of advertising of watching in return for the freebie and 59% said that it made them more interested in the brand being advertised. I reckon that even better results could be achieved given more sophisticated relevance and targeting that will come in the future.

So let’s end this idea that people don’t want advertising on their mobiles (or anywhere else for that matter) as it’s completely missing the point. Consumers are happy (actively happy) to get advertising, provided that they get something in return and the clearer we can make it what that something is, the better.

Of course, that’s just the base line of acceptance. Naturally, it’s far more effective to produce ads that engage with the recipient, but that’s an argument for another day.

In the meantime, I think we can say that people do want advertising on their mobiles.

Take note Dorkface.

I’m off on holiday (vacation to our American friends) for a couple of weeks, so I’ll leave you in Carlo’s very capable hands.

I look forward to more blogging on my return, but in the meantime I’ve got some serious chillin’ to do.

Toodle pip.

Russell

The overwhelming impression that you get when attending any mobile event is that everyone there is a bloke wearing either a grey suit or a blazer/chinos combo. In fact, at a recent event, I had to smile as I overheard someone arranging to meet someone they didn’t know when they said

“I’m wearing a blue blazer, light blue shirt and chinos” as if this would help identify him in some way.

But there are a whole bunch of talented non-blokes out there and Mobile Entertainment runs a feature today in which the Top 50 Women in Mobile are profiled.

Congratulations to Mobile Entertainment for the initiative and to all the women on the list, especially the ones I nominated. I just hope they still speak to us lesser mortals from now on - by which I obviously mean, men.

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is at Andrew Grill’s blog, so make sure you check out the best writing about mobile and mobile technology of the last 7 days.

Andrew recently asked a question from the floor at a conference in which he called me the “Grandfather of Mobile Marketing”. While I appreciated the sentiment, I told the assembled delegates that in fact, I was the Godfather

Anyway, don’t forget to stop by and take a look.

I was speaking yesterday at the Broadband Connect conference in London. I couldn’t stay and mix as much as I’d have liked, but it was full of delegates and speakers who don’t often collide with the pure mobile technology and advertising worlds that I normally inhabit. This is interesting, as it gives some new perspectives that I hadn’t necessarily thought about before.

The biggest such perspective is that the destruction of the walled gardens of TV broadcast are going to tumble down in the same way that it happened on the web and more latterly on the mobile web. I guess it’ll also happen eventually in mobile access as we get more choice over how we connect to The Cloud for our voice and data needs.

I was obviously peripherally aware of the walled gardens of broadcast being threatened eventually. After all, just as in nature, the walled gardens always decay and fall down at some point, allowing a natural habitat to return and dominate over the artificial and controlled environment. However, I didn’t realise that it was quite this imminent in broadcast TV. Already you can get some Sky programmes without a subscription and if you’re prepared to go illegal and Bit Torrent, you can get pretty much anything you want.

Also, as the great and remarkably geeky, Stephen Fry pointed out in his latest Podgram, the BBC’s iPlayer has accelerated this process by liberating their content. Sure, it can only be accessed by UK residents currently, but as any 15 year old will show you, getting around this restriction is trivial for a screen ager.

There’s lots of chaos coming down the line in the next decade - and possibly chaos is the natural order of things in the future. But chaos leads to lots of opportunities for the brave and the fast. There’s simply never been a better time to be a fledgling entrepreneur. What’s your idea and what are you going to do about it?