It's not all about the iPhone -- or is it?

Saw this on the NYTimes blog section today. 

V.C. Advice to Entrepreneurs: It’s Not All About the iPhone
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Though almost every discussion at the MobileBeat conference in Sunnyvale, Calif., on Thursday centered around the iPhone, venture capitalists told mobile entrepreneurs to broaden their focus and build applications for all phones. Still, all anyone wanted to talk about was the Apple App Store, from which users have downloaded 30 million applications for the iPhone this month.

Startups should “intelligently hedge their bets across multiple platforms,” advised Richard Wong of Accel Partners. His firm has invested in mobile games and application site GetJar, “the store for the other 3 billion phones that aren’t iPhones,” as Mr. Wong put it.

Rick Segal of Blackberry Partners Fund and JLA Ventures reminded developers that the iPhone only accounts for a tiny share of the worldwide market. In India, for example, Nokia has 70 percent market share. “You must think multi-platform,” he said.

Some investors insisted that multiple mobile platforms–whether Apple’s, Google’s, Research in Motion’s or others–will thrive. Matt Murphy, head of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ $100 million iFund, said most entrepreneurs who pitch him have iPhone applications, but that the platform war “is not a winner-take-all game.”

David Sokolic of Battery Ventures disagrees. He predicts a shakeout akin to the PC market and Microsoft’s Windows, with a clear leader emerging...

Two learning points here, I think.

1. It IS all about the iPhone for mobile entrepreneurs, whose main goal is to take invested capital and gain quick cash flows. The iPhone is not the product: the real product is the Apple platform, which is about as direct-to-consumer as you can get, with the added bonus of being a trusted channel. Apple's true insight with the iPod and the iPhone is that the PLATFORM is the offer, and the benefit of that offer is a simple, trusted source for digital content. By giving that platform so easily to entrepreneurs, Apple theoretically can build robust product ecosystem very quickly, while giving software developers the ability to leverage what they presumably do well: build and sell software. Software entrepreneurs are usually terrible at marketing. 

Contrast the Apple "platform" with what you have to go through to get Nokia's attention in India. I think the VC's are looking at this wrong. The risk is in getting to early cash flow, not in diversifying the customer base at a huge up-front cost for HR, multi-platform technical support, and high cost of marketing. 

2. Will a clear leader emerge? One thing that strategists almost uniformly ignore is the power of the retail channel to keep a leader from emerging. So long as both hardware and software are sold through retail, you'll have multiple players. Retailers just have too much incentive to keep suppliers vying for the value of their in-person sales channel to give it over to one provider. It gives the retailer buying power, and it gives the OEM a channel they can rely on -- even if there's price pressure. 

So, to answer the question, will a clear leader emerge, we have to look at the question, will people start buying phones and mobile software primarily through retail, or will they start buying the phones and software primarily via the Internet? Because on the Internet, clear leaders do emerge.

Want to lay bets on the future of mobile phone retail? I know how I'm placing my own bet.

UPDATE: Very interesting and intelligent forum/blog discussion on the topic of the iPhone app ecosystem vs the Facebook ecosystem. I have my own views, but the interesting thing here is that you can see the POV of investors, developers and customers.