Business Week takes a look at how Myspace is maneuvering to embed itself in mobile phones by getting special Myspace software preloaded in the handsets.
We've seen this happen before -- the "battle for the desktop," which of course was over before it started. Microsoft simply swept aside Prodigy and AOL, which had made deals with various computer manufacturers. Scott Kurnit, who at the time was Prodigy's VP/marketing, said "Microsoft's idea of a level playing field is to bulldoze the other guys' buildings."
This one will be different. We don't have a smartphone platform monoculture or a telecom monoculture. Nobody's powerful enough to run a bulldozer.
There's room for diversity ... so long as that diversity comes with deep pockets and antes up enough money to the telecoms.
The rest of us? I'm not so sure.
You have to be a high-order technowizard to figure out how to install an application on most of the new smartphones. And many of them still make it nigh-on impossible for a consumer to subvert the corporate order by entering a URL in a browser.