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With the advent of iPhone, there’s been a rise in talk about the “mobile Web”. The Web itself has been mobile for several years – at least since I strapped a wireless modem onto the back of my Palm Pilot (this would have been 1998 or 1999) and started surfing.

What we have now isn’t precisely the mobile Web. It is mobile, and some of it does involve the Web (or, more precisely, HTTP), but that is not the whole of the story, or, in eighteen month’s time, will that even be the biggest part of the story.

I’ve already installed my first 3G killer app on my iPhone – SimplifyMedia. It became immediately clear – just over the course of a 30 minute walk to the grocery and back – that I would blow through my rather meager 500MB Vodafone data cap very quickly using SimplifyMedia. Streaming media is just too irresistible.

Streaming media is not specifically a Web technology. It integrates well with the Web, it can even be delivered via the Web, but it is not the Web.

Qik and Flixwagon, which both provide live video broadcasting from my iPhone, do post those videos to a website. But very little of the Web is involved in moving the video stream from my iPhone to their respective sites. So, once again, this is not the mobile Web. This is something else.

And I’m convinced that using the term “mobile Web” will only constrain our ability to entertain the possibilities for pervasive 3G networks.

Much has been made of the enormous sales iTunes App Store has garnered in the first few weeks after its launch. Steve Jobs was recently quoted as saying it may generate Apple a half a billion dollars in revenue year, perhaps even a billion.

Which begs the question: why hasn’t this been done before? It should be possible – nay, easy – to tie software distribution to an OS license key (that god-awful 20-character string you have to manually type in during a Windows install) which would provide the same level of minimal “FairPlay” security you get with an iTunes song or a signed (legally distributed) iTunes App Store application.

And certainly there is a huge market for applications that cost between 99 cents and $9.99 which perform useful things.

How is it that Microsoft hasn’t married those two ideas together? Even with piracy, if you make things cheap enough and easy enough to get to, people will pay for them. iTunes is proof of that, and the iTunes App Store is further proof.

So, will I be buying my MS Office OSX components at $59.99 a pop this time next year through some version of Live Mesh? I rather think so, because Microsoft takes 100% of that sale. Which means they’ll likely earn more on that sale – at a lower price – than they would through the channel. And yes, another $59.99 for PowerPoint, another for Access, another for Excel. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Expect it. Soon.