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Robert Scoble: "Every month longer that this deal takes is tens of millions in Google’s pockets. Why? Well, the real race today isn’t for search. Isn’t for email. Isn’t for IM. It’s for ownership of your mobile phone."

That was back at beginning of 2008, at the height of the Microhoo excitement. It's interesting to revisit these things.

Scoble said that this because he "met the guy who runs China’s telecom last week in Davos. He’s seeing six million new people get a cell phone in China every month."

That was 138 per minute, about twice the growth rate of internet/web adoption. In terms of world wide adoption of phones, Scoble was probably off by an order of magnitude. It's not the "next big game" as one commenter put it (Tim O'Reilly). It is the big game.

Steve Jobs: "Basically they were copier heads that just had no clue about a computer or what it could do. And so they just grabbed, eh, grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. Could have been you know a company ten times its size. Could have been IBM - could have been the IBM of the nineties. Could have been the Microsoft of the nineties."

I read 99 comments back then. About half a dozen picked up on the mobile point. Everyone was talking about property rights on social graphs and inferred information, or web2.0 ad models, or search, or the importance of email. Google still seems to the webco that understands best the importance of mobile.