“… A second-class Web could derail Google’s grand strategy. The company was trying to worm its way deeper into users’ lives by hosting applications and personal files on Google servers, then dishing them out to the always-connected consumer whenever and wherever needed. That was easy on PCs, but phones didn’t play nice with the cloud. Google dominated the Web today, but tomorrow might be a different story.”

Read it all here.

Anyway, even if we get it in small doses, I think the demand will be incontrovertible. There’s a pattern among communications companies, in that they consistently fight new paradigms for about 10 years, and then embrace them and pretend it was their idea all along. When an idea is popular — and open handsets will most definitely be popular — capital usually gets on board in the end.

The exception, of course, being monopolies (and triopolies) who pretty much get to set the rules no matter what the demand.

The million dollar question, of course, is how well this will mesh with the closed and restrictive model of mobile telephony, as carriers are quite used to treating their customers like cattle, while trying to pass off manure as some kind of precious metal deserving of a high price.

Would they want phones like these to work on their networks? I guess if they don’t, they’ll certainly do all that they can to make sure that they don’t. Bell Canada and Rogers have certainly shown that they won’t let a little thing like “progress” get in the way of their hegemony.