Verizon and other mobile carriers should make the leap into having open networks if they don’t want their clocks cleaned by Google according to a provocative op ed in Saturday’s New York Times. There’s lots to agree with here. O’Reilly is probably right that by opening their networks and encouraging the development of applications the cellular companies can secure network effects and make consumers stickier to their platforms. And it’s no doubt true that there’s so much value at stake here that if the mobile carriers don’t act, someone else is going to shake this industry up. With its $200 billion plus market cap and huge incentive to stick ads on an IP-connected mobile phone, that someone is probably Google.

It is also quite astounding that in this age of data mining the cellular carriers just sit on all that gold in their customer databases. I don’t see the mobile companies including Verizon emerging as the real catalysts of the mobile ecosystem, sitting in the center like Microsoft has done with PC software and Visa has done with payment cards (see The Catalyst Code book). That’s more likely to be someone who develops a great software platform for the Internet-connected mobile phone or someone who develops the killer hardware/software platform for mobile connectivity. Those companies could obtain a global footprint and massive scale. The mobile carriers industry is too fragmented—nationally in many countries and certainly globally—to get the sort of network effects that propel a FaceBook, Google, or Microsoft.

But even without being able to capture the gold ring that O’Reilly sets out the mobile carriers can surely do much better by opening up their platforms and helping others expand the ecosystem. They for sure need to make sure that they can charge for their hugely expensive infrastructure. But their future is most likely acting as critical distribution pipes for the mobile ecosystem than adopting the old, failed AOL walled garden approach.

For more of my views on this see my past posts:
Google Mobile’s Strategy
Will Google Be the Catalyst for the Mobile Ecosystem?
Mobile: Lots of Tricks, Not Much Traction
And my CTIA presentation Mobile a Catalyst for Traditional Media?