The 800 Pound Gorilla NOT in the Room

Last week I attended the CTIA Wireless 2008 Expo in Las Vegas. This event is the annual industry tech fest attended by anyone and everyone who makes a difference in the world of wireless. CEO’s and senior execs of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Lucent, Ericsson, Samsung, Microsoft, RIM et al were there making sure that their particular market angle was being hyped. What happened in Vegas last week definitely did not stay in Vegas!

However, embedded in the speeches and announcements was one popular theme – how nervous is the iPhone “ground swell” making everyone? Over 2.3M iPhones have been registered on the various carrier networks in the first few months it was released, a truly astounding statistic for any single wireless device. The fact that about a million more than that have been sold is an odd anomaly that is generally thought to be caused by Asian and European visitors to the US buying them in bulk using cheap US Dollars, taking them home and hacking them to work in their own country.

Well over 20M iPhones are expected to be sold before the year is out and by the end of 2009 close to 50M. I expect we will see iPhone 2.0 announced early next year. One of the biggest VC companies in the known universe, Kleiner Perkins, who has achieved cult status in the Valley over the years with home runs like Google, announced the $100 “iFund” specifically to invest in iPhone app developers. The iPhone has achieved a cult status in 6 months all on its own!

But, amongst all this incessant iPhone chatter - where was Apple? Not a single Apple booth amongst the 1,200 + in the exhibit hall, no senior executive making a key note, no representative in any of the conference sessions, not even an Apple sponsored offsite after-hours cocktail bash.

Maybe it’s me, but for such a game changer in the industry, this lack of presence was truly astonishing. I know Steve Jobs likes to control his world and buck the system, but it is almost like the planners for CTIA forgot to give him a call: “Hey Steve, since you are new to the whole Wireless world, you might want to know about our little conference, we’d love to have you show up and do your thing -its not like the boring PC industry; wireless is really cool and you’d really like the people.”

In the next few years, annual revenues from the wireless industry are expected to exceed $100B which will be bigger than the entire Sports industry ($96B) and almost as big as the Casino industry ($105B). Come to think of it, maybe those cool people at CTIA want to keep quiet about this for a little longer and hope that Apple does not crash their party quite yet.