Just as interesting a question might be:

Why haven’t mobile networks realised how important they are and leveraged it?

A potential answer might be because they’re short-sighted unimaginative and greedy (on the executive level) always looking at the next financial quarter/s, otherwise they would have executed the concepts of “Apps” and Mapping and LBS and Micro-blogging and Social networks long before any of the current category-leaders : They used to charge 70% for apps, etc. and for every single location-call/request, and even after what Google did with Google Earth on the PC Desktop, they didn’t think of the bigger picture if they did the same with their own versions on their own networks – ALL ideas from long before Google/Facebook/4Square’s birth.

E.g. Imagine if Vodafone was to buy 4Sq and not only pre-install it on all it’s handsets as a core functionality, but pre-populate the data from the billing-relationship, then use it’s business accounts to push the revenue-generation side combined with a completely self-serving dashboard using it’s existing advertising and recurring-revenue infrastructure.

And still, they continue to leak opportunities in spite of the various R+D labs and smart techs within them.

Yours kindly,

Shakir Razak

Microsoft spent $500 million to purchase Danger Inc.

Microsoft then spent another $700 million to port Sidekick from its Java OS to Windows CE, to become the Kin, employing a few hundred software developers to achieve it.

Microsoft then spent $100 million to market it.

Then it all went up in smoke in 48 days.

Let’s leave the debate about promotional acumen aside for a second and look at deep pockets. Microsoft, Google and Nokia’s pockets aren’t deep enough to spend the same amount of money marketing their phones as Apple does the iPhone? Seriously?

What missing here is a product as good as the iPhone, not cash or marketing ability.