Heed the Schumpeterian power of the mobile phone

[Commentary] What will the mobile phone devour next? It permanently crushed the gadget that defined the beginning of the last decade - the personal digital assistant - and is eating through the landline telephone, digital camera, iPod and even the watch. The creative destruction has just begun. Investors should heed the mobile phone's Schumpeterian powers. When the century began, bankers 'beamed' each other information via the now-quaint infrared technology of the Palm Pilot, whose maker boasted a $92 billion market value. Palm shifted into mobile phones but lost 97 percent of its value along the way. This should provide a cautionary tale to other industries standing in the cell phone's path. The most obvious target is the traditional telephone. Almost a quarter of all American households, and counting, no longer have a fixed-line phone. That's a drag for operators like AT&T and Verizon who must continue to run their expensive copper-based infrastructure despite running the biggest wireless networks, but terrifying for providers without wireless operations, like Qwest and Frontier. Even the iPod faces obsolescence. Unit sales are in decline. Although that's not a problem for Apple as long as its customers listen to music on their pricier iPhones instead.