Looking at the profusion of start-ups seeking to cash in on the latest set of APIs and the newest devices, I find myself wondering whether a strong strategy can be built upon such a churning base. One thing that was nice about the early nineties was that we had a firm rhythm going around the waves in the industry caused by each new OS release. When Micosoft had its act together, we were able to line up all the top tier ISVs to simultaneously release new versions of their apps that took advantage of (hence forced) the users to upgrade to take advantage of the latest and greatest. Within Visual C++, we completely embraced the OS releases (including betas) as the only significant market forces, and decided there was no point trying to create our own waves. Riding the OS waves became our most central planning and strategy design point. Looking at new mobile OS's coming out of Apple and Google every couple of months, and new APIs coming out of everyone (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Google...) I wonder if the smarter surfers aren't waiting for the bigger waves, rather than getting buffetted by the more frequent ripples, which never quite reach the beach.