PayPal’s lawsuit against Google is bringing into focus the massive stakes in mobile markets. More on that in a minute.
I was thinking about all kinds of scenarios from Blackberry World last month. There were Adobe and Facebook executives showing support. With Android binaries, Google’s ecosystem gets involved, even if Google wants to stay out of the fray. So do amazon and Verizon with their own Android app stores. And there was Microsoft, ostensibly only pushing Bing, not trying a Nokia-type coup. And Apple was watching amused from a distance.
Now onto mobile payments. To start with given parent eBay’s somewhat sluggish decade, people seem to have forgotten that PayPal has quietly become a major player when it comes to on-line payments. $ 90 billion processed last year with users in 190 countries. They have forgotten more about obscure regulatory compliance in many of those countries, fraud detection and money laundering in the last decade than most tech companies have learned.
While Google and Apple and amazon and others want a piece of mobile payments, even more so do the banks and the card companies. And they have the global reach and the regulatory savvy. And then there is the telcos, who definitely have the regulatory savvy if not the global reach.
Talking of telcos, Microsoft could use its Skype acquisition to gain plenty of leverage with them – or to compete with them for the obscene margins in mobile roaming.
And then there is SAP. While the positioning at the recent Sapphire event was on mobile apps for enterprises, its Sybase unit with its Mobile 365 acquisition has a relationship with most major telcos around the world.
Banks, telcos, enterprise software vendors, oh my! Consumers shouldn’t worry about Google Wallet, but more their own!
