I am conceding an argument today with a friend. He is an advocate of thinking about M2M as part of the overall commercialism in the market.

Mary Meeker and the team at Morgan Stanley call it the Consumerism of IT. The reality is that most of us have more computing power available to us in our homes, our cars and our smartphones than we have on our desktops.

Part of the problem Microsoft (News - Alert) is looking at is the laggardly nature of the desktop. As HTML 5 gets enabled Internet Explorer is the least likely upgrade of all the major browsers. And a great majority of those browsers are on the desktop at our place of business.

The message we should be getting is that our mobility needs to be considered as an integral part of our M2M implementations.

Portman Security Systems (News - Alert) and Enfora are the applications I found on my Android Market providing GPS and SMS interfaces.

On the iPhone the best I could find from the website is remote control which included by Luminair, Mercedes-Benz and Zipcar.

As the sales allegory says, this market is very open for M2M companies to become better known. It also may represent the standardization, I feel is coming. 

My sense is that while the iPhone started the market, Google (News - Alert) is the better enabler. If you look at anything involving a map, it’s almost always GoogleMaps these days.

While Portman does not specifically use Google for maps we should expect that Google continues to dominate the ability to develop widgets.

However, be careful how you develop your applications. While Android (News - Alert) is showing signs of fragmentation, Google Chrome is the real strategy that should be used as a base for development.

Let me say this differently, HTML5 is going to be the base. If you ask me which company will have the easiest tools to build your own application program interface I suspect it will be Google.

I say this because everyone else is bound to a part of the food chain that may limit then.  

However, I should note that everyone is trying to find the right positioning.

One that is most interesting is the acquisition of Day Software by Adobe. The personnel of Day Software includes Roy Fielding, the person that has given us the REST protocol which has become a darling of developers.

A good way to think about HTML5 is that the need for proprietary will disappear and as it disappears the odds are we should be able to combine widgets to make m2m applications.