01710nas a2200121   4500008004100000022001400041245008700055210006900142260004200211520127700253100002201530856003601552       2009                        eng d  a1913-610200aThe Arrival of the Mobile Internet Thanks to the Economics of Open Source Software0 aArrival of the Mobile Internet Thanks to the Economics of Open S  aOttawabTalent First Networkc01/20093 aThe promise of the mobile Internet has been long in coming. In 1992, then Apple CEO John Sculley was promising this "pocket-sized digital communicating devices" market would be "the mother of all markets", while Intel CEO Andrew Grove called it "a pipe dream driven by greed." Since then the mobile phone business has exploded, and personal digital assistants like the Palm Pilot have burst onto the scene. The launch of the RIM Blackberry brought a real email interface to the PDA world. The World Wide Web itself continues to grow enormously, with Netcraft's December 2008 survey receiving responses from 186,727,854 websites.

We are just now arriving at a convergence in the market that is 16 years in the making. Handset and PDA manufacturers, mobile network operators, chip manufacturers, and computer platform hardware and software vendors all collide with the economics of the Web, collaborative development, and open source software. Indeed, we are seeing a point in history in which the mobile handset manufacturers and their partners are using open source software and collaborative development to ensure they do not get trapped in the narrow margin price war that caught the personal computer original equipment manufacturers in the previous technology wave.1 aWalli, Stephen, R  uhttp://timreview.ca/article/221