Buried in a terrific New York Times piece on the increasingly personal feud between Apple and Google was this sentence:

Google has long feared that rivals like Microsoft or Apple or wireless carriers like Verizon could block access to its services on devices like smartphones, which could soon eclipse computers as the primary gateway to the Web.

It’s just a fragment of a sentence, but it shines a light on a massive high-tech tectonic shift. We’re moving away from computers, towards smartphones, and fast.

And here’s the question, whether you’re a manufacturer of hardware or software, an engineer, or an executive in marketing or public relations: Are You Ready?

Are you prepared?

What are you doing to position yourself and your company to take advantage of that shift, and these:

• The move from hard drives to clouds.
• The move from consumers desiring privacy to sharing everything from family pictures to their second-by-second locations with “friends and followers”.
• The move from renting DVDs to downloading the content on them.
• The move from recording family memories on some kind of media to recording them to flash memory.
• The move from HDTVs to 3DTVs.

All of the above are in various stages of happening, but they’re all under way. Every one of these massive changes offers all of us opportunities to help people through them. We can help the manufacturers creating them, and the consumers reacting to them.

So, how will you help?