Recently at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, TX, Andy Lees, the Senior Vice President of the Mobile Communications Business, talked about what he described as a "gold rush" opportunity in the mobile industry:

"...the change is not just about the mobile industry; it's how a number of different industries are coming together to converge. Now, convergence has been talked about for a long time, but this is it. It's a gold rush of opportunity.

"It's a gold rush in that the way these industries are coming together and how the things are going to be set forward, all of those decisions are going to be made in the next couple of years.

"In fact, today, what's happening is as potential business partners are getting together, both people turn up at the meeting expecting the other person to pay them. We're seeing changing business models, the evolution of hardware, software, media companies, telcos, music businesses, all coming together to collide to create new opportunities. So, this is a gold rush."

 The complete transcript is here.

That's a really good read.

I like how they include a scenario and at the end let people know that this is not just hypothetical, this is an actual product available to the partners already.

I was especially intrigued in the figures quoted at the beginning regarding the number of Mobile devices and Windows Mobile devices out there.

Andy Lees:

You'll see in that in fiscal year '08 there was just under 1.2 billion phones that were sold, 1.2 billion. Compare that to the number of PCs at about 277 million.

Andy Lees:

...we're seeing significant growth in Windows Mobile. In fact, in the Q1 in this calendar year, we sold about over 4.5 million devices in a single quarter.

Thanks for the links Bill.