Last week while Mobile World Congress was taking place, Apple launched its revised subscription agreement on the AppStore forcing all third party vendors to pay 30% on the content that flows through iOS apps even after initial purchase. Understandably, the world revolted with all sorts of public letters to Apple arguing about why 30% was too much to allow for continued innovation on the iOS platform.

What happens next will come to be known as Apple's Alamo moment. For those that don't remember their US history, the Battle of the Alamo was the moment during which the US didn't lose Texas to Mexico thanks to the fact that a lot of Texans were moved to dig in and fight hard because of the feeling that Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana had gone too far and been too brutal in his handling of the two week siege on Texan soil.

If Apple prevails in forcing all in-app payments (for content or otherwise) to go through its 30% tax, we're looking at a world where others will likely follow suit soon enough. On the bright side, the web will become more "monetizable" than it has ever been before (watch what happens with Facebook credits for instance)— albeit by the platform vendors. If on the other hand, Apple backs down in the face of all of the cries of "unfair," we'll end up right back where we started with the web— with Applandia being nothing more than a curated onramp to the wild west of creative monetization strategies.

I'm rooting for the latter but unlike the web days, this time around I am not optimistic. Why? Well because of the way these communications/media ecosystems develop.

With my first MWC in Barcelona behind me, I thought I'd write some quick observations in a new format: the easy (obvious) conclusion from walking around and meeting with folks, followed by the more nuanced interpretation after having caught up on sleep and thought a little bit harder about things.

Easy conclusion: In the era of blogs and Twitter, traveling all the way to Barcelona to hear about the future of the mobile world is a waste of jet fuel.

Nuanced: If you care about mobile, this is the one conference to attend all year. Apple may not have been on hand to accept its "Best Device" award for the iPhone 4 but whether you care about the operators, device makers, or even the new kings of Applandia, you'll never get as high density of interesting folks to see. Plus, because the conference is done with a European sensitivity, you can avoid that "I'm about to get crushed" feeling that you get at CES both at the conference and at the various evening after parties.

Easy conclusion: Carriers are quickly becoming the dumb pipes they deserve to be— the future belongs to the citizens of Applandia and the chiclet-sized paradise they are going to deliver us into. Meeting with Vodafone? Pfff— it was way cooler to run into the CEO of Rovio (Angry Birds).

Nuanced: Every app maker I ran into at the show was either coming from, going to, or really looking forward to, a meeting with a carrier. And not just the up-and-comming hopefuls but also the guys who've already shipped millions of units and (in some cases) become household brands. Why? Big fat piles of money. And the fact that three years into the smartphone revolution, there isn't a single sleeping giant left where the carriers are concerned (or at least I didn't meet them). Dumb pipes? Maybe if you laid over in Amsterdam with a few hours to kill. Otherwise the folks getting ~$100/month from the "subscribers" are still pretty meaningful in this game.

Easy conclusion: The mobile OS game is done and its a two horse race: Android for the volume play and iOS for the high-end Apple faithful. RIM is decaying with the half-life of a Uranium isotope and everyone else should just go home (sorry Winokia and HP).

Nuanced: Here I sort of half agree in that I think Winokia and HP are too little too late to matter (though I will admit that for now RIM seems like a big wildcard). Where it gets trickier though is that it's really hard to see Android being the same as everyone else at the rodeo. It's more movement than operating system in the way that we've traditionally thought of it: device makers, carriers, and even consumers are excited about it because it seems to make the whole mobile thing so easy. To that end, it was hard to argue with the amazing booth (and corresponding party) that Google put on to show that this was a movement that was here to stay.

And still, I can't help but wonder about the comment that a friend made as we sat on the second floor of the booth watching the masses of developers and device makers sliding down the curvey dot-com era slide into commoditized pit of Android phones and tablets: "Look at all of these sheep on the way to the slaughterhouse," he said to me, "not realizing that they are going to race to the bottom when it comes to margins in this business."

He was half right in that I think all of these tier one and tier two device makers are in a race to the bottom. But what seems more interesting is thinking about what their likely response will be when they fully realize that this is where they will end up without doing something to differentiate their product. INQ "Facebook" Android-powered phones? Nokia's act three after Windokia fails to deliver? Straight up forks of Android by people who get the balls to actually start writing software again?

As Horace writes, it is hard to call this particular movie over when it just started and when the two "dominant" players didn't even exist three years ago. Instead it's worth thinking about the Android explosion as one of these industry redefining movements that will leave a whole new world in its wake. Much like Linux did in the datacenter, we'll probably end up looking at a whole class of new winners when the dust settles which no one would have ever foreseen by looking at Android as simply the "mass market" iOS play. It's hard to see who they will be— though what is not hard to see is that it won't be the folks playing the Apple game a few years behind with their $800 tablets and undifferentiated phones. At least not in this round.

Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and by extension the east coast technology corridor, died this week. Though he was a very low key guy, the legacy of the company that he built still looms large around here, with both the engineering culture he created and scads of alums having gone on to live well beyond DEC's being swallowed by Compaq over a decade ago.

Of all the commemorative stuff written about Olsen this week, it was Andy Kessler's piece at GigaOm that most caught my attention. In it Andy (who often writes really thoughtful stuff) ascribes the failure of DEC to its inability to "horizontalize" in the face of the PC where Intel, Microsoft and the banana handlers (HP, Compaq, Dell, et al) focused on providing just one layer of value instead of DEC's attempt at an integrated solution.

It would certainly be easier if it was truly axiomatic that this type of vertical integration is certain death for companies in technology. Except of course that it is not as in the case of the smartphone shows today. Or what the storage vendors have shown over the last 10 years. Or the current "cloud" providers on both the compute cycle and storage services.

The best model for understanding what really matters is presented by Clayton Christensen, of Innovator's Dilemma fame, in a book called Seeing What's Next (which in my opinion is the best of the lot because he puts his framework to practice). In it he fleshes out the argument that vertical integration actually makes sense depending on how effectively the technology can address the market need. In cases where some fundamental constraint (computing power, storage, cost) exists to deliver what it takes to satisfy the customer, it is often the integrated players that win. And when the technology (often fueled by the exponent in Moore's law) gets to the point where it overshoots the solution, then it is ok for layers to be created where each one can begin to move at a different rate, and incidentally when the most opportunities are created for lots of capital efficient startups to be born.

But integration is not bad per se, and more importantly, it is not always a quick transition from one state to the other.

In fact, this transition was not what killed DEC. DEC was vertically integrated in the minicomputer space because it made sense to be— even long after the PDP era, the tight coupling between VAX and VMS made it possible for the company to use relatively underpowered hardware to deliver solutions into the market that were decades ahead of the rest of the world. What killed DEC was much simpler: they just missed the PC altogether (the DEC Rainbow was a half-assed attempt at getting in the PC business).

So what is the lesson to take here? First that over simplifications are often wrong and in the era of blogs an retweets they can often hide simplistic thinking in easily digestible repetition.

More importantly though, to all the folks waiting for the "horizontalization" that got DEC to come and kill today's integrated king, or who perhaps are pointing their product development roadmaps towards the coming "layer" winners (read: Android), you might be waiting a long time. Or at least until the BrainPal comes to kill the smartphone.

Having recently spent sometime behind the big tech company iron curtain, I feel fairly inoculated against the rah-rah style corporate video that tries to render the profit-making motive in a romantic "change-the-world" form. However I keep coming back to IBM's 100 year anniversary film by Errol Morris:

It's a terrific reminder that computation has been put to use for much grander tasks than self-actualization and better shopping. Not that there is anything wrong with those things (I've spent a fair bit of my career mining those two), but it's hard to compare them to say, putting in the additional return-to-Earth calculations into the Apollo 13 computer that saved the astronauts.