The only way HP can recover from this is to articulate some brilliant strategy that creates a cloud ecosystem that includes the PC, and I wonder whether it’s capable of something that radical, or even whether such a positioning could be articulated at all from the PC side. Apple, which has its own set of announcements in the cloud space, would have the pizazz to make a cloud appliance move, but that’s because Apple has differentiable brand power behind its appliances. Google could do the same. HP? Come on!

The Apple iOS 5 and iCloud launch today, and while frankly neither are particularly revolutionary, they are still credible steps toward what might turn out to be a revolution. The iCloud mission seems now to be one of creating “unity” among the iOS devices, meaning to create a virtual iOS umbrella that covers everything Apple and essentially makes iOS a virtual operating system (OS) residing in part in every appliance and also in the cloud. What Apple has not yet done, but that I’m confident it will do, is to realize the potential of that model with services beyond collective iOS chatting.

We could call what’s likely to emerge from the Apple/Google/Microsoft dynamic “social communications,” but it’s also arguably the first step toward network-supported behavior modification, something that’s going to unite identity, location-based services (LBS), demography, buying/shopping behavior, advertising and promotion, and a bunch of other things. Why? Because it creates a kind of parallel universe in (dare I use the cliché) cyberspace where our alter egos have electronic tools and systemic knowledge they share with the real us through our appliances. That’s the end-game for everybody.

Sony is right in this case. Apple has demonstrated that the notion of a separate smartphone/tablet/game system market is unlikely to prevail in the real world. What’s really happening is that there’s an appliance market that shows (at the moment) three distinct faces. Some users will accept them all, and others will gravitate to one of the group, depending on how they balance the various applications and issues. The point is that it’s likely that all of these appliances will have a feature base in common, and that symbiosis among the devices will be important for players who want to keep multifaceted buyers in the vendor’s product domain.

This is also reflective of what Apple needs to deal with now, in the world it created. Things like televisions are clearly going to join the appliance ecosystem, and other stuff probably will, too. But what’s going to matter more is the experience that can be delivered through all this stuff, not the exact boundaries of the “stuff space.” Apple TV isn’t important except as a member of the Apple Ecosystem, and fleshing out that ecosystem is a job for cloud-hosted features, something that Apple is yet to demonstrate it grasps.

But then, Google hasn’t demonstrated that, either. Only Amazon so far has any cloud reality — and even there it’s not completely clear that they have a strategy or whether they just stumbled into a couple of gold coins from a pirate horde. Can they find the rest of the loot? We’ll see.

Another indication of market turmoil is today’s UBS decision to lower their earnings forecasts for Alcatel-Lucent. There is nothing in particular about the company’s products or strategy behind the move; it’s rooted in Alcatel-Lucent’s large exposure to the EU market and the debt crisis there, as well as cost reduction issues that the company still confronts.

I’ve noted many times over the years that Alcatel-Lucent has a position of unique opportunity and risk, both derived from the common cause of its broad product line. The company is in everything everywhere, so it has unparalleled influence. In the last year or so, though, Alcatel-Lucent has fallen victim to the common network equipment vendor problem of weak articulation. We’ve seen many examples of the company being unable to control an engagement that it is objectively the only player capable of supporting. Why? Because Alcatel-Lucent has no clear marketing position, particularly on its website, and because you can’t expect a sales force to be a strategic marketing tool; they’re compensated to close deals. In some cases, the sales team in carrier accounts can’t even recognize a service-layer opportunity.

Oracle is making its cloud strategy a bit clearer, but there are still plenty of places where the connection between offering and goal are a bit fuzzy. Perhaps the most revealing is its announcement of Oracle Public Cloud (OPC), a social-network front-end to a cloud service bazaar that will eventually include all of Oracle’s Fusion applications.

The idea is that companies can use this front-end to provide teams and individuals a point of access that offers them cloud capabilities based on their identity, and thus allows both line departments and IT to buy elastic capacity. The focus of the OPC is Software as a Service (SaaS), yet another example of the fact that anyone really looking at profit in the cloud has to be looking at the place where the largest amount of user cost can be displaced. SaaS also simplifies the notion of work backup and overflow, and since Oracle has championed the database appliance that can simplify data mobility and has embraced a Hadoop-friendly model for data distribution, you can argue that they’ve got the best cloud position in the market. In fact, I expect to see IBM working to refine their own strategy to ensure they can fill the same role.

The move comes at a critical time for Apple. While the company has almost been the single-handed driver of the mobile revolution, the product cycles in that space are getting shorter, and it’s harder to say what the next generation of devices might be. A smartphone is a logical extension of a standard phone and one that exploits the broadband mobile connectivity that was already in place. A tablet is in many ways an extension of a smartphone. What extends the tablet? What is the Next Big Thing? The answer is the cloud, the mobile/behavioral ecosystem that will create the electronic virtual world we’ll all live in, in parallel with the real world. For Apple, it’s the iCloud, a course Steve Jobs has already charted.

Google knows that, of course, and sees a similar vision. One could argue that Google sees it even more clearly than Apple, in fact, because Apple’s culture has always been just a tad elitist and thus egocentric. Android and the MMI deal are Google’s appliance play, and for now, ChromeOS is carrying the flag of the cloud, in the form of hosting the thinnest of all possible clients. ChromeOS, in my view, is just a placeholder for an eventual shift toward a more Android-centric future, but one that focuses on exploiting Android as a cloud conduit, just as Apple wants iOS to be.

The thing is, the secret sauce of the future is the mobile/behavioral stuff, and neither Apple nor Google have any particular incumbency there. Nobody does, in fact. My work with operators suggests that they understand there’s a lot to be done and a lot of money to be made in the mobile/behavioral symbiosis. The problem they have is that this particular area of service innovation is even more vague than content monetization, and they can’t get anyone on the vendor side to talk effectively about content. What hope do they have for mobile?  If you’re a vendor and if you want to own the market of the future, this is the problem you need to solve for your customers.

Interestingly, Alcatel-Lucent has just issued a press release calling for more thoughtful use of mobile assets in customer care, and when you read into the details, you see some of the elements of a mobile/behavioral solution at a more general level.  The Alcatel-Lucent mantra is “contact me, connect me, know me,” and that is pretty much what I believe to be the key to mobile/behavioral opportunity. You have to be able to reach the customer proactively with social/behavioral changes to their virtual world, to connect them to the other partners (human or cloud-machine) in that world, and you have to know a lot about their interests, desires and prohibitions to make inferences about what’s best for them at that moment in time. I’d like to see Alcatel-Lucent take this story more into the general consumer market. I’d also like to see some competitors push the story even further.