Just like 10 years ago, and then again five years ago, the technology industry is changing. That means companies are enjoying new opportunities and wrestling with new challenges. Only some will win. I’ll offer my perspective as an analyst on who is winning, who is losing and why. I believe you will find this column both interesting and valuable.

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CRM vendors that have wondered about the necessity of porting their applications to the small screen should take note of last week’s acquisition of Instagram by Facebook. Instagram is the tip of a big iceberg and is perhaps a signal of yet another disruption in a disruption-prone industry.

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It finally has happened — the number of U.S. mobile subscribers who own smartphones is just about equal to the number who own feature phones, according to new data. As of Feb. 2012, 49.7 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers carried a smartphone — an increase of 38 percent from Feb. 2011, when only 36 percent of mobile subscribers owned smartphones. The driver behind this trend was the lopsided adoption of smartphones by mobile phone buyers in recent months.

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If you read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, you get a good sense of the rivalry between Jobs and Bill Gates and Microsoft, or between Apple and the rest of the world more generally. But the rivalries were really between that past/present — and the future — and Jobs and Gates were only playing parts that were scripted long ago. The play’s outlines are of insurgent new ideas against the status quo.

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After the recent Super Bowl game, Twitter reported that during the final three minutes of the game between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots, an average of 10,000 tweets were sent every second. This sheer volume of tweets is almost unimaginable. My first thought was that all of these tweets were going into the ether at a purely indigestible rate. What’s the point, I thought?

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