Their business plans in the near (and perhaps mid) term appear to depend on getting users to use their mobile internet services. It reminds me of AOL circa the mid 90s, as opposed to being a pure ISP.

I’m not trying to paint the operators in an especially bad light. I think the whole mobile industry has gotten itself into a situation where real standards are currently out of reach (the kind that will see orders of magnitude increase in mobile sites and mobile site access). To this end I do applaud Yahoo, it is a step (albeit a small one) in the right direction.

I think it’s really interesting with mobile internet that there is such a strong *perception* of a walled garden when, in most instances that I’ve come across, the garden isn’t actually walled at all!

True Walled gardens seem to be pretty rare these days, meaning that you can almost always access the ‘real’ internet… but the way that the landing pages for each network are designed, the exit points are often difficult to locate (even when you’re looking for them), and the OS UI rarely helps. So, intriguingly, we end up with imaginary walls.

If only! Unfortunately we have deadlock because everyone is competing with everyone else. The operators don’t want to work with each other, and don’t want to cede ‘control of the customer’ to the .coms (google, yahoo, etc). Meanwhile the handset manufacturers don’t want to work with each other and don’t want to hand over complete UX control to the operators (who tend to be very bad at it anyway).

Result… gridlock

Yahoo Go is interesting but it’s still walled-garden-like. And I have reservations about the use of lots of different midlets (assuming this is a midlet?).

iMode worked for very specific reasons to do with the Japanese market. Namely extreme control by the operators (DoCoMo and AU KDDI are the only serious operators there), who specified iMode standards to all handset manufacturers. There is no parallel to this market structure outside of Japan.