The scenario I see is that the mobile will become our primary digital device and that when we need to, we’ll dock it into a dumb terminal to get a bigger screen and a keyboard. Although, if we look further ahead again, I’m sure keyboards will disappear as an interface, followed by screens – some kind of contact lens or glasses will replace them. Most people who really know, tell me that the docking idea isn’t going to happen and no manufacturer is thinking in these terms at all. But I’m sticking to my thinking.

It seems that legendary tech entrepreneur and investor, Mark Cuban, agrees with me, which is reassuring.

….I could carry my Sidekick or ITouch with me and when I set it on my desk, or even walk into a hotel room, it immediately makes a connection with my monitor or HDTV , my full size keyboard and either with a usb cable or wirelessly, lets me connect to a thumbdrive or some external hard drive.

Mark’s main question is when, not really if. So at least if I am barking up the wrong tree, I seem to be in good company now.

Incidentally, if this theory is right, Microsoft are the big losers as they have no significant presence in mobile today – Windows Mobile just hasn’t made it and HTC are the only handset manufacturer with any volume sales, accounting for 80% of all sales ever (courtesy of some excellent sleuthing of Tricia Duryee of MocoNews).

Redmond badly needs a plan for mobile. Perhaps they’ll but RIM, which would be a good start.

In fairness, these plans often then add “…and then all we need to do is get Nokia to install it on all their phones and we’ll all be rich.” This is Underpant Gnome* thinking and understandably gets dismissed pretty quickly.

However, things are not quite so black and white as this – they rarely are. Plenty of companies have been managing to persuade consumers to download applications – if the user clearly understood why they should be interested. So, games have enjoyed success and mobile IM has also been a big beneficiary for companies like Reporo, BluePulse and Mxit. Ringtones have worked pretty well too, although they’re not normally described as an app per se.

However, companies with less clear USPs have suffered, especially ones where you really have to experience it to understand that it’s great.

The success of Grand Master Jobs’s Apple Store has highlighted that there’s gold in those thar apps after all and suddenly apps businesses are credible and stand a very good chance of getting funding. This is only the beginning though, with apps store variants being launched by Google’s Android, as well as yesterday’s backdoor leakage ofMicrosoft’s Skymarket via a job spec.

Actually, considering Redmond’s experience in the PC environment and the fact they’ve been doing Windows Mobile for 8 years now, it’s quite surprising that they hadn’t done this before. But I guess if the Apple way was obvious, Symbian, Brew and JME would all have been long riding this bandwagon and supporting their developers with a better way to market.

That’s not all though. Even carriers are trying to get in on the act, with Sprint announcing in July that they were going down the same route. Expect to see similar announcements from others in due course.

And then there’s the dark horse in the race with GetJar, which is the incredibly popular independent download site for the mobile geek community and which quietly got funded by Accel Partners a few months back (Accel are also investors in AdMob, by the way). MocoNews had a very comprehensive interview with these guys last week, but they’ve had 300 million downloads since 2004 and are averaging out at 13 million a month. OK, unlike some other players in the market, GetJar’s downloads are free, but these are still big numbers, albeit tiny in comparison to the mobile web. Expect some of those new carrier portals to be powered by GetJar, according to MocoNews.

So now we can see the bandwagon, is it too late to jump on it, to paraphrase Lord Hanson?

Again, this isn’t a binary outcome and certainly for the developer community, they’ve never had it so good – up to a point. Getting your product to market looks easier for sure, but then as more developers come into the market, getting visibility is still going to be really hard. Fortunately, mobile web advertising can give great visibility, so it’s not all doom and gloom on this front, especially for AdMob

And while it’s true that the Apple apps store does sell applications (they sold $30 million in the first month) this is still a market that’s dominated by the F-word – FREE. Which probably means relying on an advertising model in some shape or form. And if you’re going down that route, I’d still suggest it’s better to look at a mobile web-based solution, as a generalisation. The mobile web has far greater numbers, is easier to develop for and iterate and consumers can figure out your proposition without the hassle of downloading something first.

Of course, I’d always advise players in this space to do both. Launch with a mobile web version, learn and iterate – and then launch via an application, or perhaps a series of applications, which will appeal to your power users, who will relish the additional functionality you can give them in an app.

I’m not suggesting that you can’t make money selling apps – the Apple stats show that it’s possible – but this is not the easy market that the current Gold Rush mentality might indicate. And let’s not forget, most people don’t ever make money in a Gold Rush apart from the companies that sell the miners the equipment in the first place.

* If you didn’t get the Underpant reference, or just want to enjoy the classic South Park scene, here you go

The reason for my dramatic headline was that if mobile is the future, Intel’s curious decision doomed them in the long term.

It seems that two short years later, they’re certainly back in the game and banging the mobile drum. Sense has apparently prevailed.

They are still hedging their bets on what exactly is a mobile device – they include notebooks – but it seems that Nokia, as an example, is certainly in their sites as a potential customer.

Also interesting is their investment alongside Yahoo!, HP and three universities in a cloud computing project. There was a time when doing something like that without Microsoft as a partner would have looked a little odd.

Not so anymore though.

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.