The more things change, the more they remain the same

I had a strange feeling when the Cold War ended. Something like being lost. Sure it was great that we weren’t going to be blown to bits any second, but man what a change.

I had the same feeling as the tech landscape has changed the last couple of years. When I first became aware of the computer industry, the titans were raging - Apple, IBM, Oracle, and Sun and their iconic leaders aligned against Microsoft in a battle royal, an epic struggle. Talk about haters – Sun’s McNealy, Apple’s Jobs, Oracle’s Ellison slung some memorable comments in the press.

But that battle petered out. Microsoft is no longer the feisty newcomer trying to teach big iron how to play their own game. Now the tables have turned and they are the entrenched monolith trying to survive obsolescence, frequently called the “new IBM”. McNealy and Sun have both retired from the game. Ellison has gone underground, Oracle becoming if anything stronger and bigger, but no longer boisterous.

But the quiet was eerie. The tech industry needs personality. It needs drama. It needs events to record passing time against. It’s like how the national news will find a key picture or two of a family or a person and show it over and over, to help everyone identify with a disaster like a flood. Sure tons of people are effected, but that one are two are the landmark we use for remembrance.

Well now all of a sudden we have it once again, and in spades, in the mobile computing space. Mr. Jobs, some would say last man standing from the initial conflicts, is taking all the new kids out behind the woodshed for some schooling. He’s got Adobe over his knee on Flash and dev kits, though some are saying this is pure spite over a slight to the Mac platform from a decade ago. He’s calling his ally Google, who had the best apps on the iPhone and a member on his board at one point , some really nasty names. One of his disgruntled ex-employees has doppelganger-ed Palm and now HP into facing off against him. And he’s even found time to take the battle to juggernaut Amazon’s home turf in the book category with the iPad. It’s the wild wild West.

It’s tough to say what would be best for consumers here, competition or cooperation. I’d really love to see some standards develop around PIM (contacts, calendars, etc.), syncing, mobile web-browsing. On the other hand, these guys are going to duke it out by throwing billions of dollars into one-up-man-ship. Look at the acceleration of development of mobile phones going on right now, and compare it to the years RIM Blackberry and Microsoft CE let the market languish.

I’m going to go pop some popcorn.