Investors expressed their disappointment in Google’s latest earnings report (which was released prematurely) by sending shares steeply downward, but there’s far less consensus on how the company’s mobile advertising business is doing. CNET tells us that it’s booming, noting that $8 billion in mobile-ad revenues represents a big step forward from the same period last year, but The Street writes about Google’s mobile mess, suggesting that the bulk of money in today’s mobile market comes from hardware, not advertising.

Google is under the microscope here not just because it’s such a huge company but because it claims a massive 42 percent share of the U.S. mobile advertising market. (Millennial Media is the second-largest player at 17 percent.) As Google goes, according to the conventional wisdom, so does the overall market.

That’s true to an extent, although it minimizes the impact of a wide variety of smaller players (including Millennial.) But I think Google’s success in mobile advertising more or less parallels the market as a whole: It’s growing substantially as opposed to exponentially in a segment that has been over-hyped for years. And that incremental growth will continue for the foreseeable future as mobile advertising ascends to one of the most important media platforms in the world.

All this navel-gazing reminds me of something a wireless veteran told me years ago: Changes in the mobile market occur much more slowly than people think in the short term, but very quickly over the long haul.