I haven’t blogged here about technology and marketing much lately. Mostly because I have been too busy consulting on it at my new agency, Converseon, and wrote two articles elsewhere about trend curation and local search results. I’m also preparing for the panel I’ll be participating on regarding SEO and social media at the SheBlogs Conference next week. Too bad that even at a women’s conference, men end up speaking on SEO. I swear, search is cool!

I should also note that my company was recently listed among three leaders in the Forrester Wave for listening platforms. Last month, one of the other three leaders was acquired by SalesForce for over $300 million. That puts us in good company, and I’m proud to bring my decade of search experience toward the cause.

Converseon is working on some giant leaps forward in online marketing and social media research. Yet one of the things that bugs me about our consumer culture is that people focus too heavily on what is coming tomorrow. My good friend, futurist Garry Golden, summarized this to me recently by giving this short-sighted philosophy a name — incrementalism. Incrementalists are the people who last century would have preferred to breed a faster horse rather than embrace disruptive technologies like the train, car, or airplane. That kind of thinking leaves you susceptible to black swans and holds society back. It certainly doesn’t lead to revolutions in thought or action.

We discussed the topic after attending a Carnegie Hall talk with Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal and Sir Howard Stringer, Chairman and CEO of Sony. One of Mossberg’s early comments was that Sony Ericsson simply makes too many models of phones. Stringer acknowledged the fact but did not seem to indicate any change was on the horizon. If not, that spells a slow death for the joint venture with their Swedish counterparts. Perhaps it is unfair to pit their Q1 sales against Apple since Sony was hit especially hard by the earthquake in Japan. However, it is ridiculous that they currently offer 54 different types in America alone, where they are not even close to being a dominant player. They could easily make the world’s best phone again if only they stopped their incremental efforts and started concentrating more of their brainpower and budgets into creating a revolutionary new device. Imagine if they made 54 kinds of video game systems. Think PlayStation would be as popular?

At the end of the talk, I had the good fortune of being called on to ask my question from the audience and was able to inquire about Sir Howard’s thoughts on the pending AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile. Surprisingly, he came out stronger than I expected against monopolies. Of course, Sony Ericsson does not have much to lose since they haven’t had a huge presence in the US for years. Most Americans never even knew they made the best smartphones prior to the iPhone and Pre because they were never subsidized by a carrier and thus priced out of the market often at over $800.

It is worth pointing out that they probably made so many models that carriers just refused to carry them all. But Sony’s poor business decisions do not alter the fact that they are at the whims of the new mobile goliaths. I’m sure that Sony has long lamented the carrier situation in America, but it is nice to finally get more companies on the record saying so. Anti-trust enforcement has been a joke in this country lately, regardless of the party in charge. Monopoly power begets incrementalism as a direct consequence of strangling the industry and lacking competition. Quality in the American auto industry would have continued its decline if there hadn’t been competition from Japan. Sales may have never fully recovered, but at least the Big Three make better products now.

Unfortunately, modern business journalism also seems to favor monopolies and incrementalism. Even though I was able to ask a pointed question in a public forum and saw Stringer’s response in print, it was not the lead of the story. In fact, online aggregators and republishers focused entirely on a different Apple story that was nothing but a side note to me. Sir Howard alluded that Apple may be including a Sony image sensor in the next version of the iPad or iPhone. Honestly, does that matter in the long term? The next versions will always be better. Big surprise. Who cares if the camera will be 6 or 8 or 10 megapixels? I hate commercials that say, “Our best ever!” I certainly hope so. Are they saying that we should assume that products usually regress and get worse?

Let’s look at the long term view instead. The AT&T and T-Mobile travesty leaves a single American carrier supporting the world GSM standard. Sprint will be squeezed even further to compete with a near duopoly. I would not be surprised to see Verizon make an offer for them at some point. Then the entire industry would be off limits to newcomers because the startup costs would be truly astronomical. (When T-Mobile was independent, starting a competitor would have only been exorbitant.) A mobile duopoly is not good for Sony Ericsson, other phone makers, or for customers. Why isn’t that news repeated more often?