Microsoft-Nokia: Hardware Is Dead. Software Is Dead, Too

Where does software begin and hardware end? The answer is it doesn't matter. We are now inside a truly converged world, where distinctions between form and function have evaporated. Software is hardware. Hardware is software. Everything is everything. What happens next? Here are five things to consider:

1. Scale matters more than ever before.
2. The coming Google-Samsung showdown
3. Competition is from the Eastern periphery. Not the Western core.
4. Developers lose leverage.
5. The winner is the network.

In a world where everything is everything, the distinctions between good hardware and good software won't matter much to the middleman. Whatever happens to Microsoft, there will be more bits floating up and down these networks than we could possibly have dreamed of.