RIP .mobi?

Just a quick observation here.

The team at .mobi have done a lot to raise awareness of the need for publishers to take mobile seriously and consider making a separate implementation for the mobile web. One can debate whether the emphasis has been in the right place: is it about technical implementation or about the end user proposition? Perhaps the topic for another post (I'll take a look though - this must have been tackled before).

Nevertheless, I think .mobi has lost the war without hostilities really beginning. The dream that all publishers would have .mobi at the end of a url to denote their mobile version seems irrelevant now. Just trawling mobile internet sites over the past weeks and months, it occurs to me that I have come across less than five instances of a .mobi url but many either re-routing directly from www or pointing me to m..com. This latter looks like becoming the de facto standard without any form of marketing whatsoever.