“It’s so heterogenous that it’s virtually impossible for your customers to tell their friends about your service” and expect that they will also be able to use the service, Shapiro said. “This is deeply depressing. ... We will not see the Facebook or Twitter or Yahoo of mobile services until this changes.”

The question, however, is how to change this environment. One way would be for a single OS to become a monopoly. “It’s not so clear that’s a great solution,” Shapiro said.

Alternatively, developers can target a niche. For example, a user of an enterprise application on a BlackBerry might tell a friend who is also a business person about the app. Since BlackBerry devices are widely used among business people, that friend has a better chance of also having a BlackBerry and thus being able to use the app, he said.

Developers could also simply wait. “Things are getting better, slowly,” Shapiro said. For example, an increasing number of people use smartphones, and technologies such as Java and Brew have emerged that help developers build applications that can work across an array of phones.

“But we won’t see anything like the Web for a while,” he said. “Until that happens, we’re stuck in the world of 1970s marketing.”