Is the mobile era, a repeat of the mainframe, the minicomputer and the PC revolutions? Very much so, says Nokia CTO, Bob Iannucci (pictured), who gave today's luncheon keynote at SOFCON 2008.

For the head of Nokia's Silicon Valley Research Center, the three last high-tech revolutions followed exactly the same pattern, with 4 distinct phases: the build-up of costly and incompatible hardware; a consolidation phase with the advent of a "standard" platform; the rise of software and finally the emergence of a services economy.

"We're just getting started [in the mobile world] and it's a little hard to say given the 3.5 billion people using mobile phones in the world... but it's true... I'm watching a movie that i've seen before 3 times", said Iannucci

Nokia's CTO revisionist history of what will happen in mobility. First the mainframe:

"In the early days, pre-1964 of the mainframe world, there was a huge diversity of equipment. And in fact the perceived value in the mainframe world was all about the computers themselves, the hardware. The amazing thing is that this didn't persists... That actually change in 1964 when IBM announced a major cataclysm in the world: they decided their should be one architecture to rule them all. And what ended up happening wa value started shifting with that single creation of a standard platform from the hardware to other things... creating compatible hardware [with the IBM/360]... and like it or not it reshaped an entire industry... But over time, the value shifted to software and eventually services".

Then the mini-computer:

"The same thing happened... During the golden age, there was this huge diversity of hardware, lots of incompatibility and then... Let there be VAX... and all of a sudden there was an enormous software industry that sprung up around VAX... eventually value shifted to software and UNIX was the great big deal and eventually our friends at EDS figured out how to make money out of integrating the hardware and the software".

And the PC/Desktop revolution:

"The IBM PC [the standard platform] redefined this entire industry... then the value went to software and services".

The future world of mobility - Phase 1:

"What we are today is the golden age... there's a huge diversity of hardware. The devices are largely incompatible. The notion of someone writing a piece of software that runs across all mobile devices in the world does not exist yet. Why? Because there isn't a standard platform".

Nokia is calling for an open platform

For Iannucci, future mobile devices will have even more radios (3G, GPS, Bluetooth...) - the number of GPS-enabled phones will surpass the number of GPS standalone devices, but also better software to take advantage of the many sensors already embedded in the current phones.

After his keynote, Nokia's CTO eluded to me that the Finnish company might open its phone platform a-la Apple with its iPhone SDK or Google Android. Let the battle for the mobile standard platform (Apple, Google Android, Nokia/S60, Windows Mobile), i.e. phase 2, begins!