The widely rumored Gphone hit the news few days ago in the widely commented Android dogfood diet for the holidays post on Google Mobile blog:

“We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.”

Many spent few words about this statement and, by reading this post on Zdnet I’ve got too few thoughts about it.

Main points raised on Larry Dignan’s post on ZDnet were about product price point and, in general, commercialization strategy (subsidy, selling it unlocked, carriers involvement): to be true seems that most of them have been outdated in a day by the upcoming news.

In fact, just few hours later, sites like HTC Source substantially sort out all details about handset commercialization model, actually giving the impression that such discussion was started months ago (at least between the members of the Android historic team BigG, HTC and T-Mobile – remember the G1?).

It seems that the handset will be sold online (not very clear where and how) by the 5th of January (!) being cross-subsidized by BigG and T-mobile (that is apparently the first Operator to embrace the product) at an extremely aggressive 199$ price point.

As T. Ricker on engadget refers:

“If this device is sold unlocked (as rumored), at a reasonable price (as hoped), and with a jaw dropping user experience (as tweeted), well, it could be very disruptive to the status quo. Then again, that’s a lot of ifs.”

I was quite sure that the first commercialization of the handset would have gone through an Operator:  despite rumors about direct web support, Google has no retailer network and despite running service desk support for many of its selling products its capability to offer first level support on handset malfunctions it yet to be proved. Someone at phones review is asking if Verizon is going to do the same as T-Mobile, we’ll see.

I’m also quite curious to understand how Google is going to manage the double-subsidization policy: will 199$ price be fixed? will the commercialization model be common for all Operators? basically promoting the same approach adopted by Apple for the iPhone.

Since carriers battled to subsidize iPhones (despite the very little freedom in commercialization) it’s likely to happen the same, when it comes to a lower price point, since BigG looks for less revenues on product sales (with an eye to mobile advertising core market).

To understand how other carriers will react we need to know more about things like tethering, VOIP or Google Voice: for sure the cooperation with operators is one of the key point to evaluate product success.

Google has often been pragmatic and will probably derogate on too disruptive features in case those make the conflict with operators rise threatening the whole project. While has been demonstrated that Google Voice is not under discussion I’m quite sure that tethering can be easily dropped in favor of a better Operator sustainability.

For sure the product has potential: Google is driving innovation by defining a Proof of Concept that Android is capable to deliver the best UX available on market and by creating new ways of communication such as Waveing.

So far the combination seems too appealing for customers to be ostracized from any of the players in the mobile business chain.

A confirmation that the device will be so aggressive in terms of price (199$ IS aggressive!) is the presence of the well known Google partner, the asian, Taiwanese, OEM HTC.

Someone is noticing that no HTC logo is present on mock ups spotted up to now: HTC can use this product to improve its market share and its brand perception, I ‘m sure that HTC logo will appear somewhere on the phone: HTC has surely been asked to keep the BOM low, I’m sure that they spent much effort on the project and seems strange not seeing its brand anyway on the product….but, let’s see, this is just an experiment in a product line, the involvement could be seen at long term, hard to say.

Apparently product will run Android 2.1 Flan, to be released, according to electronista ultra shortly, on Dec. the 11th.

All those big expectations rely on the overall product quality further than price. The user experience delivered by the handset must be absolutely astonishing and shool look at opening to embracing other players of today’s  web experience in the project… did you heard about Phonebook 2.0? Facebook and Twitter?

Google can effectively help them monetize their communities, as it’s doing by indexing their contents. I’m sure they’re already working together to make things work perfectly as a whole.

The threatened player here seems Apple, that will likely soon suffer from a more open, collaborative, probably cheaper and more sustainable competitor (for other chain players): Google is not interested in the same business, BigG only need users, not passionate brand lovers.

At the end of the discussion the true losers here seem handset vendors formerly involved in the OHA: probably Google is getting a bit impatient but, for sure, they looked lazy to the boss making BigG came up with the decision of home brewing the perfect Googlephone (that was meant to be the Moto Droid). It’s indubitably hard to manage for Motorola: actually seems that this handset will compete with the Droid that, anyway, keeps a slight different target in terms of market proposition thanks to its QWERTY Keyboard.

From a features perspective, as said, the phone will be the first being empowered by Android Flan (I don’t believe that the OTA update for Motorola Droid or HTC Hero will be released in advance). Flan has been so far characterized by a hardly arguable feature roadmap, and despite being just 0.1 away from Éclair (rumored for being a somehow Motorola exclusive) will probably introduce some significant changes and UX improvements.

If Google wants to brand this product as strong as it seems I’ld expect also a small set of first fruits such as, a googlewave client (why not?), a Chrome Mobile port (probably not) with flash enabled (hopefully) and truly optimized service integration features such as finally mature location awareness or augmented reality with user generated content such as GoogleGoggles.

What a disruptive start for mobile industry’s 2010! Don’t be too quiet in your Enterprise(s), a Nexus is arriving…

NEXUS arriving

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eole/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

From Wikipedia:

A commodity is some good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.

On Thurs 19/11, BigG released Google Chromium Source code to community while hosting an announcement/demo event.

Parallerly some high level architectural description has been as well released and the greater focus has been undubtably put to security concepts and browser role.

The leading concepts that inspired Google when conceiving Chrome Os leaves little open to the discussion and starts from  the overall assumption that Chrome Os will be something new and, radically, different.

The approach of realizing something so new and push it so aggressively on the market can be considered fool (if you think how different will this be from any former commercial OS existing) or, at least,  very ambitious.

Consciously enough, Big G embraced the open source model to develop this assett even if the whole licensing policy it’s not so clear, at least to me, up to now (anyway, it should be a mix of GPL for Linux kernel derivative/mixed part such as the window manager and BSD, as formerly adopted for Chrome).

The experience matured with Android demonstrated Google that commoditizing the OS and reducing BOM is the main road to create a special feeling with hardware vendors and ensure radical penetration of the OS in hardware vendors roadmaps (for those non deeply inside the mobile market, expect a 2010 full of Robots outside).

But, at the end, given that is also very well backed in terms of investments and market strategy, will it become “the new thing” as expected by much?

Chrome OS introduces lots of radical technology changes as well as some cultural ones. The fact that Chrome Os is actually a commodity to users and vendors, leaves, as said, Big G a big design freedom that, eventually, will transform the user in what really was meant to be from the start.

In fact, if the high level suggestions will be confirmed, you’ll no more be able to completely admin your computer (that is no more a “personal” physical thing): it’s actually Google, to ensure that your security and the compelling performances promised are granted, controlling the machine that runs your “personal session“. User and applications will be sandboxed, updates will be forced and signed (trusted) where considered radically needed.

To do this, Google will follow a streamlined paradigm that has been embraced, if not invented, by Apple for the iPhone: controlling what runs on your machine with certified apps (only one in case of Chrome Os actually, the browser) will grant security and performance requirements.

If they will succeed to create a convincing new user experience there’s a big chance that Chrome Os, as happened to iPhone os, will be a substantial success.

At one point, the question:

“will user give up desktop applications?”

is, IMHO, quiet old fashioned by itself. I mean, who’s a user? we have plenty of users neither knowing what a “desktop application” is! …the parallel to iPhone is back again: most of the iPhone users bought this as the first smartphone in their life and discovered the “mobile connected life” just thanks to buying  an iPhone for it’s status symbol appeal.

Many people only use a browser all day (e.g terminal operators); sometimes they also use an office automation suite (already migrated to good web implementation); few of us use the so called “desktop apps” for two main use cases:

• computing intensive operations, typical to a workstation user
• apps needing to access device hardware

While for the first topic grid\nw computing solutions are well trained (think to Citrix Xen), the second one is one of the key innovation points expected to be improved by Google Chrome OS itself being also a potential reason of instability.

Transforming Chrome OS from a niche product to the new standard will be a hard but not impossible move, depending on how much of the entire technology megatrends have been intercepted by Google product thinkers.

In case they’ll succeed this will be probably fatal to a huge number of the “old world” technologies. We’ll forget Java and interpreted languages on clients;  untrusted computing will be outdated as well in favour of sandboxing; distributed peer to peer systems as we know it  will probably disappear  (maybe I’m a bit radical on this) thanks to the central role of networks resident data.

The process of shifting user ownership from the piece of metal (personal computer) to the  sensible data and computing sessions (personal computing) will eventually get onto subsidizing the Hardware via ads: is data lock in being important to Google, they’re open to pay you a pc in change of hosting your data.

Do you trust them?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/ / CC BY 2.0

“…convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”.

original credits @ random letters - jessiemoore

What deals with Free software & transparency better than the gov sector? isn’t it a matter of freedom when we talk of an efficient public sector, independent from software services industry giants? Instead, what we see is the GSA stating who’s good and who’s bad in the *aaS industry.

“Google CEO Eric Schmidt didn’t say anything as he flanked President-elect Barack Obama during his first post-election press conference. He didn’t have to.

The image alone of Schmidt standing elbow-to-elbow with Obama’s top economic thinkers was enough to send shivers up the spine of Google’s competitors.”

“The cloud is coming of age, and we applaud the Obama Administration’s efforts to ensure our government realizes its many advantages”

I recently read many skeptical posts re Google’s announcement about Google Chrome OS. That was not a big news in itself since, for those that occasionally ended up on www.thinkgos.com page in the last few months, an official announcement of a Google service proposition optimized OS for thin clients was quite obvious.

Most common complaints about the potential success of Chrome OS are related to Google OS strategy (claimed to be conflicting and confused) and potential (Android considered not such good) and to Google business proposition for the OS market (claimed to be a pure anti-Microsoft move).

I’ll try to give my views about this couple of topics:

• Android and Chrome OS will be conflicting or it means that Android doesn’t work

Apart from the never ending list of names used to identify the new devices that are finding their place in the consumer electronic market (MIDs, netbooks, nettops, touchbooks, smartbooks…and counting) there is one thing to keep in mind about that: they’re different from a phone (even the smarter phone on earth).

Those differences are mainly based on the concept of a phone itself: portable, small, lightweight, handy.

You’ll newer see a smartphone with a 13 inches display since it doesn’t fit in your pocket, as well as you’ll newer use a mouse on your smartphone and while you can use touch input on both, your fingertips meet differently with so different (in size) screens.

At the end smartphones are for mobile users while *books (let’s call it like that) are for nomadic users. This end up in very different usage patterns, that may intersect sometimes, but are not overlapped (while you can think to wrote a document snippet on a smartphone – I’m doing this right now – you probably won’t write a presentation or code on it)

Every industry insider can tell you that Android is an hi-quality OS for smartphones, the result of a long term Google strategy (started in2005 with Google’s Android company acquisition) that is expected to perform well in terms of numbers in 2H09 an 2010.

On the other hand, nobody prevents Chrome OS to be able to run dalvik jvm based applications. We’ve heard of Ubuntu running android applications so why Chrome OS won’t?

At the end I think that Android and Chrome OS will not conflict.

• It’s an anti-Microsoft move

There’s someone saying that Chrome OS will not work since it’s a clear anti microsoft move with the only aim of cutting market shares from the Redmond guys. Michael Mace from Mobile Opportunity says:

If you’re really serious about running a logical OS program in its own right, you’d try to rationalize those two things. But if your top priority is to commoditize Microsoft, then you don’t mind pushing out a couple of overlapping initiatives.

First, it should be noticed that Ms market share is falling without any help from Google guys.  Apart from the well known US vs Microsoft antitrust case, see here for details, that certainly shows how, in some ways, Microsoft managed to keep its market dominance; Windows is now the consumer desktop\laptop market leader mostly due a couple of reasons. Ms competitors have formerly been:

• a consciously niche vendor (Apple)
• few players not comparable in terms of r&d investments: Linux distributors like mandriva or canonical.

Furthermore, we’ve been used, over the desktop market, to see the Linux community struggling to replicate the windows experience and applications suites (see Openoffice or Gimp story).

Now the landscape is definitively different: Google has a new vision and goes towards a brand new concept of OS, targeted for an emerging market, cheaper, more in line with the exploding user base of the Internet natives.

Someone can say: “…hey it’s just the thin client we’re talking about since years!”; yes but now there’s Google and a clear productization and market strategy: free software, preloaded and backed by many big Computer firms, targeted directly to customers (BigG2C).

Jason Hiner at ZDNEt says that it’s too late since Windows 7 will be out and will be rocking hard at the time when Google Chrome OS will be released. It should be noted that Windows 7 is a retreat, is a simplified version of an ugly and heavyweight (fat?) OS wich many decided to downgrade from, that didn’t introduce any new high level views and concepts.

Chrome OS has been targeted to an emerging market (and user base) share, the *books, needing a web centered and cheaper OS (why call a windows xp equipped small notebook a netbook???). Is a result of a long term vision introduced by Google since years (Google has been pioneering the consumer cloud service market, remember gmail was born years ago) and, seems to me – thinking to gos - the final result of long term strategies and efforts.

To me this means only one thing: Microsoft is now a follower in the thin client *book optimized market. Furthermore Google is a web native company, someone thinks Google IS the web.

To be true I think that Microsoft should start worrying because, apart from the Google thing threat on the consumer oriented thin client market, also in the heavyweight/expensiveHW OS market there is an angry competitor, with a fantastic brand, sales going well (surely better than MS), and , not to be underestimated, sharing a board member with BigG (Eric Schmidt).

On this topic it’s also worth to read this from Matt Asay that recalls a WSJ article about a potential Cold War between BigG and Ms. Althought the hypothesis is fascinating (anyone noticed the not so strange Bing->ChromeOS timeline?) I don’t believe to it.

At this stage I see a future proof company that is leading the ideas landscape (who’s not eager to see Google Wave? which, to quote M. Asay,  ”…promises to put Google, not Microsoft, in control of the future “office productivity” market.”) and, on the other side, a follower company, that spent the last 2 years rebuilding an inefficient OS and literally copying and re-branding a search engine.

If there’s a war between Ms and BigG, maybe someone should realize that this war is over.

Modified from the original "dance until the war is over" - © Paulo Renato Souza Cunha

Penguins party - credits to mkrigsman

According to the quite recent joint announcement, Intel and Nokia are starting a long term partnership with the aim of integrating Moblin, Maemo and oFono projects to eventually build an Intel based, Linux empowered MID/Smartphone (the difference is not so much evident at today) device.

The evidence to me is that, in the mid-long term, the domination of ARM based architectures is not to be seen as acquired.

There’s an evident demand of more powerful CPU’s and chipsets in general but, on the other hand, the demand for low drain on batteries is as well a priority. Therefore a little more competition in the Mobile device CPU market is appreciable.

Other rumours confirm that the upcoming Dell MID device will be likely equipped with Android (I’ll be very surprised it this will not happen).

As I mentioned very early on this blog in the “Nokia secret love for linux” post, I’m not convinced of Nokia’s Symbian aquisition move from the very beginning. I’m not surprised that Nokia is considering Linux the best suitable platform for empowering the next generation connected devices and smartphones.

But, if you read this story from Eric Brown on LinuxForDevices you’ll see him quoting Gigaom’s Stacey Higginbotham

[...Lazard Capital Markets analyst Daniel Amir claims Nokia is preparing an ARM-based Android netbook for release by wireless carriers in 2010. ...]

Hey, that would be surprising!

In the meanwhile it seems to me that, behind the virtual headcount’s, Symbian is really becoming an “open” project.

I seriously want to ack the Symbian community and the job that people like Lee Williams and David Wood are doing to change Symbian OS from the 2008 condemned product (guilty of lacking innovation) to a new tool, a new framework in the hand of the developer community.

My idea is that SF is moving in the right direction althought I’m not sure they will finally suceed, my impression is that, anyway, the only way this could happen is via a strong support for community standards like BONDI.

Looking to the situation from a wider point of view last rumours only confirm the definitive penetration of OSS in Mobile Industry and the role that OSS is playing: a technological competitive innovation facilitator.

I’ld not be surprised by hearing of Google moving towards the acquisition of Canonical doing the same that they did with Android and Mobile industry in the Laptop and Server industry.

But this is another story, maybe worth a post .

addon: just thinking that following link was worth to add: also the Guardian claiming an Android Nokia handset in autumn

I’ve recently red a very  interesting post about Kindle interpreted as a disrupting innovation in Mobile Industry then, today, accidentally I came up reading this topic on ZDNET citing the WSJ:

Dell working on mobile Internet device

Who prevent Dell to produce a sort of only SIP enabled device, with a:

• 3G + Wi fi
• with a 1st citizen integrated and Cloud enabled phonebook and dialer (Android?)
• bundled with a start-up service token with something like 20€ from a leading SIP provider (e.g.: Wengo)
• with a full access to a SaaS Office automation suite (why to not use Android, since that’s Google Docs is built in)
• Synchronized with SyncML and enabled for Offline work
• full qwerty, Full touch, + tablet/pen
• thin and sexy

and most important

• to be commercialized with a built-in lifetime data access for handset to SIP gateway traffic and browsing (even subject to a decent QoS/protocol restriction agreement)

Dell is a market leading personal computer firm, it has an excellent appeal at IT professionals and has an optimal customer support system. The device would have definitively an appeal to the market. Especially if well advertised.

It would not cost much, I’m quite sure.

Would it be disruptive? I’m sure Yes.

The question is: would it be easily commercialized by Dell? What the operators would do?

It has been more than a while since we have been waiting for MIDP 3.0 specs to get closed.

Now that it seems the process is going to complete, we face a java runtime distribution across the mobile world with more shades than lights: terrible fragmentation problems (that have been one of midp 3 and MSA drivers) with hundreds of different jvms across thousands of handset models and java being discouraged or, sometimes seeming to be ostracized by and emerging tech firms and platforms (apple, windows mobile, android).

At today, JME is almost the unique dev runtime for a number of important platforms like SonyEricsson, LG and Samsung RTOS, Nokia s40, Rim (with extensions): unfortunately those platforms are niche ones or, at least, candidates to be superseded by more powerful, emerging ones (like Android, Symbian or Limo based) when the chipsets families those I’ve been built for will decrease in price and consequently being adopted on low tier models.

From a strictly technical point of view, current leading JME platforms only partially suffered of MIDP3 being so late: this mainly thanks to MSA recommendations (decreasing fragmentation partially) and jsr 211 (enabling midlet2midlet and, sometimes, midlet2native interaction).

It remains a question mark about the root reason: was MIDP 3 being late forcing java developers to be not too much visionary or ambitious or, on the contrary, there was actually no particular demand, across the developers, for such a powerful solution like MIDP3 is?

The slowness of MIDP3 development have been experienced as a problem at first but soon the mobile developers moved to alternatives where possible. Probably, the hard times that Moto experienced as a company that, at the end, impacted terribly MIDP3 schedule (being Motorola the lead) led to less interest for java as a platform and, eventually, to Apple and Google to create alternatives for their compelling platforms. Despite Apple choice could be explained with the need of a closed environment, Google choice is clearly dictated by JME technology limitations since they embraced totally the Java development community and the Java language itself despite creating a sort of new profile, a mix of JSE/CDC and novel concepts (eg. Activities).

Now the question is:

• is there still space for java to be a protagonist on Mobile Internet services?

The situation is really complex.

User demands are rapidly ramping up: now users want smartphones to give access to web contents and web services, tomorrow, the access in itself will not be enough: advanced features like phonebook presence integration, integrated conversation management, contacts syncing, user context access, content management, etc… will be considered as important features to be listed in the small labels describing specs at shops.

Is Java, with it’s bytecode-VM approach not suited to integrate with “native apps” by design? Google “all apps are equal” approach will ever be applicable to a PURE java MIDP runtime? It seems acquired that the “write once, run everywhere” promise of java has not ever been true in the mobile world until now, but anyway, as said before on this blog, thanks to the evident trend pointing out that the number of platforms is decreasing and restricting to few open OSes, java has now a new chance.

Sun and oracle must now cowork with the ecosystem, bet again on open source and, in parallel, invest to create first class JVMs for open OSes an publish it on Markets. How to monetize the effort? The application store is something making more sense to me from day to day, and JavaOne recently hold at Moscone center crearly demonstrated that Java is not dead. The Mobility general session from JavaOne has been full of news, vision, hopes and last but not least has been full of explicit endorsement (Vodafone, Verizon, SonyEriccson, Google, etc…). And Larry has been there live to state that Oracle bets on Java. At the end, something that very few days ago seemed a concept and led me to some speculations, it’s now reality: take a look at the Java Store! …and Warehouse! …there’s also a beta program, even if US only

Ah, forgot to mention that JavaFX is definitively out the “buzz-world”.

2009-2010 will be a very crucial period for JME: win or die. No niche option for java.

This post is the first that I’ve written on an android phone…Thanks G1 for existing!

I often read Jonathan Schwartz  blog posts with big interest, at least since they’re as rarest than mine and, at the end, I always enjoy to see his smiling face

Jon

I’m sure that Jon has lot more to do than me now that the new boss, that strange Larry with the sailing hobby,  is on board.

On May the 18th Jon wrote this interesting post on his blog where he advocates java being the ideal candidate to become “the” application store of the next generation.

Now, I’m a bit confused.  After reading the blog post a couple of times, I eventually came up to few conclusions and lots of questions that I’ll try to summarize, also encouraging you to share your views.

The application store hype comes from the mobile devices market where it was created, by a visionary like Steve Jobs, mostly due to two reasons: design a new value chain while controlling totally the product. With time passing and new mindsets facing the app store phenom, we’ ve seen lots of different ideas and, recently, with Nokia debuting as well as Google and others, we’ve a clear idea of what a mobile app store could be.

On the other hand, Mobile app store have introduced new concepts in application delivery that simply makes sense. Things like crowdsourcing application quality review,  a crucial feature for  every app market, or quality certification programs (like Apple does) make sense also for a desktop and notebook market, but, more important, make sense for netbooks and MIDs. Canonical working to enable Dalvik VM and Android Market for ubuntu make me think that we should give a try to Sun and Oracle for this strange idea of the world-domination-dream-java-app-market.

Anyway, the step from successful co-marketing initiatives like the ones with the toolbars, to a promise of the killer application (store) and the perfect software delivery and distribution environment is a giant size step.

But, Jon, I’ve many question from the very beginning: will this Java-Store deliver only Java apps? Will be Windows centered? or at least Desktop Centered? will embrace or be embraced by mobile platform vendors in you plans?

Is this finally the “all screen of your life” java that we are expecting since the very beginning of the Java dream?

A successful java market should exploit java pervasivity, java ease of use and outstanding adoption rate to become the central and preferred point of sales and distribution of java resources, from client applications to server components and, in general, enterprise resources.

The Java app store should be the ideal channel:

• to access cloud provided services and monitor IaaS performances
• to buy support and acquisition licenses from the commercial software providers
• to provide update and patch management services
• for open source projects to provide access to software releases

The Java app store should be accompanied with:

• an app engine/libraries set to embed Sun/Oracle IaaS in Java environment
• new partnership programs to ease the adoption and porting across different platforms (for Desktops, MIDs, Mobiles and Server technology providers)
• revenue share programs for developers
• optional software quality certifications programs

Finally I tried to manage to wrote down the following schema to help myself to figure out what  the new Java market idea could be, at the end:

the java app store as it could be (click to enlarge)

Unfortunately, if you look to Runtime Bob’s latest post on Symbian Foundation blog, it seems that neither at Symbian, where Java was meant to be a first class citizen,  they’ve a clear idea of what “the future of java” will be. Today Symbian dev portal has gone beta and is available for you at https://developer.symbian.org/.

Looking at  the JME section it seems they are serious about Java.

Hopefully at Sun tomeone has a clearest idea of the future of java. At least at Oracle they’ve, I’m sure

Unfortunately mine is different from the one that the latest statement at Sun, i.e. that the new Java Garbace collector (G1) will be available only for support license subscribers, advocates.

Let’s see.  JavaOne will probably give us some new food for thoughts.

After going in deep on the “bit pipe” topic for a couple of weeks I eventually came to notice that the most important telco operators are now embracing the model called,  in brief, “telco 2.0″.

The “walled garden” approach worked for years in the scarcely developed and small mobile Internet market we were used before Apple and Google debuted into the mobile platforms arena.

Now that things are melting, now that Internet and the mobile world have come together, now that the smartphone slice of the mobile handset market is getting bigger and bigger despite of the crisis, it’s somehow normal that the value chain of such products is subject to be reconfigured.

The old value chain we were used to, where operators and Handset vendors were the only actors producing value and obtaining revenues, is definitively dead. We are now seeing a couple of different approaches into the telco market I expect that most of the worldwide player in the industry will align to:

One is the Monolithic vendor approach, where the vendor can be one of following players:

• a web content owner (such as Google for  ”Powered by Google” Android based devices)
• an handset vendor (such as Palm for Palm Pre, or Nokia for what regards, for example, the “Comes with music” and OVI propositions)
• a technology firm, coming from a different market  (such as well known Apple I-Phones or rumoured MS Zune Phones)

well, in this model the operator usually plays what we call a “bit pipe” role:

The "monolithic vendor" approach

The other possible model is a more distributed one, where an actual ecosystem is created around the operator that plays a central role.  Despite it has some threats as well (e.g. the content trap, thanks to Fabrizio for noticing)  that’s, IMHO, the only model suitable for an operator which wants to survive.

To align to this model, an operator is asked to change the formerly used approach: it needs to find a way to produce value from the infrastructure (read: network APIs) that is, at the end, the only thing making it unique in this chain, as well as it needs to build a developer/user ecosystem to unlock a loosely controlled content production channel for it’s handset portfolio.

Since, very often, images are better than words:

The operator owned, ecosystem based approach

Most of the smartest operators in the world are moving towards such an ecosystem, for example, if we focus on EU centered operators:

• Orange with Orange Partner Program featuring a strong Operator APIs (available internationally) platform, a Developer support site providing tech. docs, a certification program and a, even not so up to date, on device delivery channel
• Vodafone with Betavine initiative and upcoming JIL – Joint Innovation Lab (Vodafone, China Mobile Limited & SOFTBANK) now delivering Developer support and a delivery channel (betavine.mobi) and very soon expected to deliver SOA oriented Network APIs a dedicated and optimized Widget SDK and a more powerful delivery channel/App Store.
• O2(Telefonica) with Litmus community including access to network API, a delivery channel/App Store (with a 70% dev/30%  opr. revenue sharing model), Developers support and a user community paid for testing beta projects and contribute with reviews and bug reports.

North American operators are, from this point of view, a bit late: you can just find  Verizon VZAppZone program featuring an “on-device” delivery channel, and Sprint ADP Application Developer Portal that is, more or less, a developer support site offering device specifications and general information.

Given that putting “monolithic products” in portfolio could be risky (IMHO it’s more a sort of ancient Japanese tradition) what other strategy could an operator follow?

None IMHO, or, at least just one. Becoming a Monolith. Like Hutch3G did with INQ.