My latest Information Week column has just gone up: "The Solution To Mobile Phone Deadlock? Somebody Has To Die." The column discusses the way that mobile phone manufacturers, carriers and record companies all blame each other for the ways that mobile telephony sucks, and how we can solve the problem by tanking one or more of those industries.
The triumvirate of phone manufacturers, mobile carriers, and entertainment companies are the world's reigning champions at shifting blame and pointing fingers. Ask Apple why it won't let you use any song in your iTunes library as an iPhone ringtone and they'll tell you it's the fault of the greedy record companies.
The music industry is supposedly so addicted to the vanishing ringtone market that they won't let Apple get away with letting you use the music you own in new ways without paying a ringtone tax (and some of them won't let you use your music this way at all).
Likewise, ask Apple why the iPhone comes locked and they'll tell you that AT&T (T) insisted on this as the only way that they'd offer Apple handsets. AT&T will tell you that locked handsets and vicious, one-sided term contracts are the only way to recoup the upfront cost of offering subsidized handsets to customers (what, they never heard of the installment plan?).
