Now that the Canucks are on the downward slope of the coaster, cruising past a few of the top teams in the league and looking at a bona fide winning streak, they need to remember the fans who supported them in getting there with a League-record 247 sellouts and the faithful purchase of a succession of horrifyingly ugly jerseys and fan paraphernalia. All of the money spent on these tickets, jerseys, and ball caps goes to support the exorbitant player salaries that players continue to demand (even journeymen like Alexandre Burrows – $2M?) even amidst what could be one of the greatest economic declines of the past 130 years.

Fortunately, there is a simple, no-cost way to send some of the love back to the fans who carry their home teams so far.  A trend is  slowly sweeping the hockey world that I think needs to take hold in Vancouver — a city that has not won a cup in the modern NHL and for nearly a century, and in particular a city that suffered through a terrible mid-season slump that even now threatens to cast the team out of cup contention with one of the highest pay rosters in the league.  This would also be a wonderful addition to other teams in the NHL.

When I was playing in Europe a few years ago it was tradition for the home to to salute the fans after the game.  Some would rather elaborately go back to the dressing room, don different warmup jerseys or remove their team jerseys, and return with their kids families to the ice to perform a “dance” of sorts for the fans… others would line up arm-in-arm and “sweep” the ice.  More simply, some just gathered at centre ice and lifted their sticks in a simple salute to their loyal supporters, most of whom are not anxious to leave the stadium early at the end of the game (some photos of the ERC Ingolstadt Panthers, which feature local boy Doug Ast, are below).

The result is a greater sense of cameraderie and family, but there is a deeper message here:  one of mutual respect, appreciation, and shared exhileration.  I realize that the lifestyle of a professional hockey player is difficult and challenging:  friends who’ve done the job are drained and spent for most of the regular season given the hectic travel and playing schedules.  As those of us who pay fortunes to play the sport appreciate, though, anyone who gets paid to do something so special as play hockey is priviledged.  It is vital to the health of the sport (and the long-term sustainance of those lofty salaries) that players feed the system that supports them.

Minor league teams like the Evansville Icemen have taken to saluting their fans now… a great way to support fans and teach young players respect for the institution of hockey.

And since a couple of seasons ago, the NY Rangers have paid tribute to their fans after each game with a simple salute.  You’ve got to admit, it just feels a little bit good to see this.  If players complain that certain arenas are a little quiet around the NHL, especially when compared to smaller but far more boisterous European arenas, perhaps it’s because the players never return the support and acknowledgement that fans give to them? Is it harder to hate a player who’s slumping when you’ve seen him skate out onto the ice with his new baby in his arms?  Do you feel as a fan like you’re more of a part of the big hockey family when there’s greater interaction with them in this manner?  The answer to all of these is “why wouldn’t you?”

So really, is it such a difficult thing to give the fans a little salute after the game before heading to the bike?  The Washington Capitals’ Ted Leonsis is a particularly enlightened and accessible owner … perhaps he’s a guy who could exhibit some leadership here?  Come on, players… let’s show the fans that the respect is mutual.

For that reason I have long been puzzled by, and wanted to meet, Doug Alward.  Who the heck is that, you might say?  Precisely.  We don’t know Doug very well at all, but it is his sacrifice that without a shadow of a doubt furthered athletic endeavour in this country on an unimaginable scale.

Terry Fox in Ontario, 1980

After all… we do, however, know and revere his good friend Terry Fox.

But here’s the thing not a lot of people know:  Without Doug, Terry could not have made his courageous run.

Last November the Vancouver Sun asked who should light the Olympic Flame at the 2010 Opening Ceremony in Vancouver.  There has been a movement afoot to nominate Betty Fox, Terry’s mother.  I think there’s a good intention here and I *really* like the idea of a nod to Terry Fox, who became even in his short life a beacon of inspiration to the world, and who is not infrequently referred to as one of the Ten Greatest Canadians.  Betty’s a wonderful woman and her connection to Terry is obvious, but she shuns the limelight, and at her tender age and conditioning would not particularly enjoy the opportunity of running a few kilometres into a crowded stadium, mounting some stairs, and lighting a giant flame.  It’s symbolic and well-intended, but probably impractical.

The infamous van, restored in 2007

In April 1980 there was only one person standing beside Terry Fox in St. John’s, Nfld as he dipped his toe in the Atlantic to begin the Marathon of Hope.

That person was Doug Alward.  An otherwise rational person by all accounts, Doug had been convinced by his best friend’s passion and dedication not only to help him train for the unprecedented task of running the world’s longest continuous highway, but to go with him.  For months Doug waited for his friend in a sweat-soaked, disgusting-smelling van at the side of the road.  As Terry approached Alward would greet him, provide any refreshments or anything he needed, and check on Fox’s health and emotional state.  Then, as Terry ran ahead, he would leapfrog the runner and drive ahead exactly one mile, stopping to repeat the process.

It had to be the most maddeningly slow drive across this country ever attempted.  He did this while their friends were off on their post-graduation trips to Europe, working at lucrative summer jobs, or preparing for University.  For much of the four-and-a-half months of the Marathon of Hope, Doug did this alone.  Still, Alward asked nothing of his friend but that he keep on running and stay healthy.

He asked nothing of us, either.  Except, perhaps, a donation to fight Cancer.

Doug Alward neither sought nor did he receive any of the limelight showered upon Terry during this heroic endeavour, yet he was there every step of the way.  It is a testament to his strength of character that he did not fall victim to the cult of personality that grew around his friend within a few weeks of beginning the run; he evidenced no jealousy of Fox’s growing fame or of the adulation of fans, politicians, and celebrities; he simply focused on his job within the team as coach, trainer, medical technician, cook, agent, manager, head of security, and fixer.

Can you imagine the entourage that would accompany such an endeavour today?  In 1980, for much of that journey it was only Doug.

Doug Alward in 2006

Perhaps 2010 is the time for us to honour his selfless contribution, just months short of the 30th anniversary of Doug’s greatest drive.  We should nominate Alward to light the flame.  Clearly it is a way for VANOC to remind the world of our local hero Terry Fox, and the fight to cure cancer that he prodded forward; but it is also a way to shine a light on the thousands of unsung heroes — coaches, trainers, sponsors, skate sharpeners, family, and friends — who truly power our athletes to the peak of their performance, as Terry surely was when he embarked on his run.

On a practical level, Doug Alward is once again a prolific runner, participating of course in the Terry Fox Runs but also in Sun Runs and other events.  He’s an active member of the Phoenix Running Club in Coquitlam.

I think it says something about Doug that I can’t seem to find a picture of him anywhere (finally did)… but perhaps now it’s time for him to enjoy a moment in the sun, for all he did for Terry… and all he did for us.

If you think this is a good idea, I’ve created a Facebook Group to advance the cause.  Join, willya?  And tell your friends.

This is the condemnation of Ethanol that many of us have been waiting for — and it frames a problem I have discussed here and here. To wit: in a world of finite natural resources and arable land, policies which encourage us to grow fuel in fields inevitably lead to deforestation and competition with food crops.

The deforestation is a double-whammy: trees clean our atmosphere of carbon, converting CO2 to Oxygen. The fewer trees remain, the less carbon is processed by the earth’s biomass, and the more of it bleeds into our atmosphere. This further accelerates Global Warming.

But now, with rising food prices, it’s become quite clear that humans are competing with gas tanks for food crops. The inevitable result of this is famine, and as we’ve seen through previous famines, the inevitable result of those are wars.

Frankly, without some rational though on sustainability (which we won’t be getting from the U.S. anytime soon) we are only hitting the gas pedal on global warming and strife.

Rumours that they’re nosing around in other cities are probably based on the fact that the Swedish kick-off discussions are still preliminary and that the NHL is exploring other possibilities. Earlier reports had them starting the season in Prague. I doubt this means they’d do this on any real scale, with a bunch of teams in a bunch of cities, but most likely another one-off like they did in London and, earlier, Japan.

However, I’ve now heard and read the Swedish rumours from a bunch of sources including my friend JR (who forwarded the Swedish piece). So this seems a little more solid than the others.

If you squint a little, that’s kind of how professional hockey began, more than 125 years ago, in the ponds and rinks of Ottawa and Montreal. Ironically it was in Buffalo where the beautiful game captivated the imagination of my favourite author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, inspiring him to become a sports writer. Even with more than 45 minutes of delays for snow clearing, hole patching, and refreezing, it was a great game which took hockey back to its roots. I think that’s an important point.

Dan Barnes, an Edmontonian, gloats that this happened first at the 2003 Heritage Classic in Commonwealth Stadium, and it’s a very good article outlining the motivations and tribulations that led to that successful effort at an outdoor game. He also advocates some other changes and innovations for the NHL season schedule.

Before I read his article I had opined a few days ago to Rhys that the NHL needs to take it on the road more often. This year the season opened between Stanley Cup winners the Anaheim Ducks and the L.A. Kings in the hockey hotbed of London, England in an event which garnered more buzz on this side of the Atlantic than it did in the UK. Leading up to that game, something (I think) more significant happened… the Kings played two exhibition games in Austria against Austrian League champions Red Bull Salzburg, and against Sweden’s First Division team Farjestad.

You can bet those two squads were up for a game against an NHL team, even one whose roster was as weak as that of the LA Kings. And you can bet Austrian fans (and those that drove from Munich and nearby in Switzerland) were treated to some great (though exhibition) play. But did the NHL do anything to promote those games? Did they even learn anything from the experiment?

Not likely. And you probably won’t see a lot of these again, except for yet more outdoor games in big football stadiums with lots of fans, in the same cities teams usually play in. Here’s a key problem: Unlike any of the other of the top 10 professional sports leagues on this earth, NHL teams are primarily financed from gate revenues at the stadium. Whereas, ticket sales are pure gravy for teams in other sports, which make most of their money from broadcast licensing and avertising, these dollars at the ticket counter the meat for NHL clubs. This means that when a team sacrifices those revenues to play elsewhere, they generally lose money.

The only reason the London game happened at all was that Kings owner Philip Anschutz also owns O2 Arena, and so was able to move the cash around his various enterprises. But for that little tidbit you’d be unlikely to have seen the game there.

In 1997 and 1998 the NHL opened the season with two games each in Japan in the run-up to the Nagano Winter Olympics. Although the League declared these a success there is some evidence that they were expensive, under-supported, economic failures — and the second of these series practically ruined the San Jose Sharks’ season, resulting in the league’s longest consecutive road trip. That has made Bettman’s promise to continue the initiative difficult to fulfill.

I’m not sure that developing a fan base in Japan particularly benefits the NHL. One thing that helps an audience identify with the players is seeing people who are like them. Unfortunately, the best the NHL could offer up to Japanese fans at the time was Paul Kariya.

Moreover, the problem with these being regulation league games (for points) is that these far-flung contests have to be woven into the NHL schedule. And after playing them, teams have to make the journey back to the US and Canada, adjust to pretty considerable JetLag, and hit the ice again for a real league game within 24-48 hours. This doesn’t exactly encourage them to want to sign up.

Watching the Spengler on TV and reading Paul Romanuk’s excellent blog on the tournament reminds me that there really is something special about how professional hockey is conducted in Europe. Having played there and seen how fans react to the teams and vice-versa, it’s reminiscent of what I can only presume to have been the case during the heyday of the NHL, through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

You may have noticed that 30% of the players in the NHL are European, but not one of them is from the UK. In fact outside of England’s foundering attempts to create a successful hockey league, Europe has a well-supported hockey community and Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, and Denmark all have vibrant professional hockey leagues with many fans. So why not support them, and in the process pull more fans to a direct interest in the NHL?

There’s already a revolving door for players between the NHL and leagues like the DEL … why not one for the fans as well? By my observation the relationship between hockey fans in Europe and the NHL is at best superficial. When the Washington Caps made German-born Olaf Kolzig their #1 goaltender, plenty of German hockey fans went out to buy Capitals jerseys with his name on the back… but are they staying up late to watch games? Ordering an NHL channel on digital cable (if there is such a thing)? Picking their favourite players for hockey pools? Not likely.

The Exhibition season for the NHL is actually rather half-hearted. Fans generally aren’t as enthusiastic about the games because the teams field the B-squads, holding their celebrities in reserve for conditioning and in fear of injury. They are also rarely broadcast on television, and as far as selling tickets goes, teams fill the seats for these throw-away games by stacking the games into full and partial seasons’ ticket packs and with give-aways .. for many teams there’s little to no honest profit in the Exhibition season.

But there is one nice thing about Exhibition games … as the LA Kings proved, you can pretty-much do whatever you want and as a bonus, you can stagger and schedule them vis-a-vis the regular season however you’d like. Some teams see the exhibition season as a necessary evil … I see it as a potential problem-solver.

My Modest Proposal is to therefore do two things during the Exhibition season, giving each team the choice of either:

1. Exhibition games in small North American towns with able support for a larger-scale game (ie. 5000+ seats in a hockey arena). Unfortunately this is too early in the winter for elaborate outdoor games. … or …
2. Exhibition play against Tier 1 club teams in Europe, perhaps a road trip consisting of 4-5 games each with a 3-day layover prior to the season start. Share the gate revenues with them (some play in NHL-sized arenas) to cover costs.

This would be a fabulous way to enhance the dialog between fans in Europe and NHL teams, and also to support the small communities which couldn’t support an NHL team (in Mr. Bettman’s opinion) but which still have rabid fan bases built around AHL, University, or Junior hockey teams. Again, this doesn’t detract from the success of those smaller-market teams but likely adds enough water to the tide to float all boats.

Let’s not kid ourselves that big-stadium outdoor games like the Heritage Classic and today’s effort in Buffalo really do anything to enhance the market for the game. Similarly I think it could be argued successfully that both experiments in Japan and in London were not cost-effective in enhancing the league’s market reach.

If the goal is making more money on an exciting winter event, fine. Let’s embrace these pond hockey games as novelties, for sure, and by all means keep doing it (teams report making more money doing so, so within reason I say fill your boots).

But if the goal is expanding the revenue from the league and growing beyond simply operating on gate receipts, let’s also work toward a schedule that does something to enhance the game and its growth; that brings in a new active global fan base; that invigorates the game with a dash of European flavour. There is natural affinity there, and a largely untapped market.

Let’s work toward growing the sport and fostering an exchange with the European leagues that will enhance the game both on and off the ice; and which also respects the contribution made by thousands of communities around the globe that contribute players to this game.

“30m tonnes of extra maize going to ethanol this year amounts to half the fall in the world’s overall grain stocks.“    

This is, however, the cornerstone of Bush’s energy policy.  He views biofuels as an alternative fuel source technology, and technology as his “way out” of the end of Peak Oil.  It’s a strategy that recklessly fiddles with the levers of supply and demand, and pays no attention whatsoever to the fundamental laws of nature.   As The Economist also points out, it’s also a source of rebalancing power, in essence breathing new life into rural communities and lining farmers’ pockets.  This might be true were we all to ascribe to the Republican notion of the hardscrabble farmer, mining the earth for its nurturing treasures to support his struggling family.  This Rockwellian picture, however, is no longer particularly accurate.  It’s a facade perpetuated to make the lining of the pockets of Agribusiness palatable to the electorate — what invariably happens is that subsidies and price optimizations end up in the coffers of companies like Monsanto.We are left in a position where government intervention has therefore had three key effects:

1. Depletion of natural resources (farmland) at an accelerated rate and;
2. Quixotically, less food available for us to consume at higher prices and;
3. Indentured servitude of harvesters at the hands of megacorps in the agribusiness.

It’s just another wealth transfer that is picking the planet clean.  Corn is only economically viable as an alternative fuel source because of subsidies and incentives.  Corn itself was originally subsidized to offset decades of grain subsidies.  The result is that little else is grown on arable land in America these days.  These subsidies discourage the growth of more natural crops and foodstuffs that could feed us efficiently and naturally, instead driving the farmer toward lower-hanging fruit, pardon the pun.  Corn is in everything we eat.  High-Fructose Corn Syrup has replaced sugar and natural sweeteners, and as our bodies seem incapable of processing it we grow fatter.  Grains are used to feed cattle and we are encouraged to gorge ourselves on high-fat, disease-infested beef.  Fundamentally, though, we should simply not be burning our food in gas tanks.  We will ultimately starve ourselves for it.  We need to nix the subsidies and diversify our foodstuffs, we need to educate and reward people for eating healthy foods, we need to pursue rational energy policy and quit looking for stopgaps, and we need to accept that fossil fuels will not represent our future.

There is, in most respects, not much room for the little guy. Still, many companies attempt to eke out a living by raising capital and earning free cash flow on the basis of moving the needle down a couple of stairs in the telecom industry’s giant race to the bottom. Frankly speaking, as consumers, we need these guys … they create the price pressure that leads to market pressure that forces the cabal to lower their prices. Without them we’d all still be paying $1/minute to call one or two counties over. But rarely (and I suspect Bernie Ebbers would verify this) do they ever make any real money over the long-term.

Because of my history as one of Cisco’s early Packet Telephony product managers, and having architected and helped to launch a few different services including BuzMe and RingCentral, I see a lot of VoIP deals. I’ve taken to referring to many of them as “stupid phone tricks” (in a nod to Letterman) which are clearly designed to take advantage of some gap in arbitrage within the telecom industry.

Unfortunately, this has been the model of telecom “innovation” for many, many years. The first Cowboys in the telecom game were of course the CallBack kids. They allowed you to make calls from Brazil to the USA, for example, paying the long-distance rate for calling from the USA to Brazil instead of the other way around by “ringing both ends” of the call after you first dialed their local or toll-free number to instantiate the call. This significant inconvenience was trumped by the massive savings incurred for folks living in Brazil calling to their USA-resident relatives.

With long-distance deregulation came the rise of prepaid calling card services, which did something similar. Again you traded the convenience of just simply dialing the person you wanted to call for having to call a pilot number, entering a complex string of unmemorable digits, and THEN entering the number you wanted to call in order to save a little dough. The services made money, though, because you and I would usually lose our cards or forget our numbers before we fully expended the value in the cards. This model is called “breakage”. To my utter disappointment this represented the larger part of the market I was dealing with while at Cisco.

More than 8 years ago I recall being asked by my boss, Alistair Woodman, to write an opportunity evaluation of the recently-ratified SIP protocol. My response, over the course of weeks of researching and talking to everyone involved, was a breathless vision espousing nothing short of a complete re-think of the entire Telecom industry. SIP has some epic flaws and paradoxes, like its assumption that we’d all be on IPv6 by 2001, and its paradoxical empowerment of edge devices while making no accommodations for firewall/NAT traversal or P2P.

But it was a pretty good stab at unhanding control of telecom from the cabal and placing it in the hands of scrappy innovators. And as the VON shows once attested, there are some pretty feisty and intelligent people lurking within the telecom business. For a time I hoped to have been one of the more noteworthy ones.

With the benefit of hindsight we now know that SIP just hasn’t panned out (certainly not in the way I had hoped it would). It’s become just another signaling protocol in the transport of fairly uninteresting voice calls within the existing structure of telecom. Let me repeat that in another way: The incumbents took a protocol which was conceived and designed to blow them out of the water, and used it to cost-optimize their networks. As a protocol, SIP is incredibly successful in having propagated in Telecom in the less than 7 years it’s been deployable, but I suspect its effects on the industry would today leave its creators a bit cold.

My breathless assertions that thanks to SIP the web geeks would take over Telecom — first derived in 1997 and held by me until at least 2002 — have never even come close to fruition. SIP, because it unbundles signaling from the calling path and especially because it allows for rich metadata to travel through the network with SIP messages, is rife with potential for adding value — but no one, not even Skype (which uses a protocol clearly inspired by SIP but which fixes a lot of its problems) has deployed it in a way that takes complete advantage of this to stimulate innovation.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Cubic Telecom. There’s a small amount of real innovation there, but it largely falls into my “Stupid Phone Tricks” category. It might or might not save you a lot of money making and receiving long-distance calls while you roam on your mobile phone, but does nothing to abate the greater crime that is mobile roaming charges. After I wrote about Cubic, David Pogue of the NY Times was attracted into their orbit, but got burned when others realized Cubic’s rates weren’t quite so attractive as they’d said they were. Controversy erupted and their launch marketing was irreversibly damaged (see here also) by the Streisand Effect of their attempts to correct and adjust perception.

A Googling of “telecom innovation” yields 10,700+ hits but, sadly, no real innovation. What you will read, instead, are examples of creative cost-optimization (Voice Mail was really a way to eliminate the answering machine at home, and the receptionist at the office). You’ll also see some incredibly creative and extravagant attempts to defeat the inconvenience associated with the CallBack model. Cool, but not fundamentally enabling.

What Cubic is presently caught up in is the fact that their dubious cost savings are hampered by the fact that calling mobile phones, for example, in Europe is always going to be expensive and hugely differentiated in terms of pricing from calling land lines in Europe. The rise of draconian mobile pricing models combined with the steep decline in global long-distance calling rates results in a more and more limited opportunity to cost-optimize and more and more pitfalls for the consumer. Unfortunately, Cubic’s a great example of how this happens and how it can bite one in the ass.

There are a number of artificial bottoms in the telecom industry. Long-Distance was the first and most obvious of these: when there was sufficient market pressure from a few successful VoIP guys (and other telco competitors) to reduce costs, the incumbents simply did so. Why? Their costs to provide long distance were arbitrary. Their only consideration was how much margin they could take without losing customers.

There are a couple of false bottoms in mobile at the moment (who am I kidding, there are half a dozen) including roaming, long-distance, and SMS. SMS is a great modern example of this and here’s why:

The cost for a mobile network to transact an SMS message are incalculably small — on par with your ISP handling an email message. Yet it’s become an enormous cash cow for the mobile phone industry — imagine if your ISP charged you a penny for every email sent or received. A small number of companies such as hotxt (now trutap) rose to try and take a notch out of the carriers on this front, but were ultimately thwarted by the fact that they have to take pot shots at the carriers from within their own ecosystem.

It’s not that easy to attack the SMS business model by requiring users to instead install an app and send and receive messages over wireless data, which is also ridiculously expensive.  It’s kind of like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and in any case I’m not sure what it accomplishes for the third-party service.  Not fun. And not particularly innovative.

There is encroachment now, by mobile telecom into terrestrial telecom, and subsequently by platforms like the iPhone and OpenMoko and the rumored GPhone. I guess this means there’s some hope for change. But all of them appear to be embracing the traditional approach to telecom and stepping up to milk the cow in collusion with the big carriers. And this, friends, is a shame. Because innovation will only be barely perceptible if we continue to allow Telecom Monopolists to write the rulebook.

-Ian.

But why? When you’re looking for answers, as they say, follow the money. The NYTimes (now mercifully free for you to read) reports on their blog that Apple, with their recent price cut, is effectively taking a loss on each iPhone and making it up on the fees paid to them via the Wireless Carriers. Well, duh. This should be no surprise to folks who know the wireless industry well. The only nuance here is that Apple has altered the way the money flows over traditional mobile phone handset makers, who are content to eke out slim margins selling phones directly to carriers, who then take a hit on the sale of the phone which is subsidized by your ongoing usage fees. As I’ve been trying to point out, the business model they’ve copied is that of Research in Motion.

There is some smarts there, but not much. Apple has clearly miscalculated the confrontation that it is about to face with its users. Apple has a vested interest in “locking in” your iPhone to a contract with their partner carriers: this is the Cathedral. They have also borne witness to the powerful effects of releasing their products out into the wild and benefiting from the vibrant hacking community which has grown up around some of their products, such as the Apple TV Hackers, and of course the flourishing OS X third-party development community (which could be likened to Eric S. Raymond’s notion of a Bazaar).

With all of those lessons in mind, Apple’s decision-making around the iPhone appears to be somewhat quixotic. But it is, for now, a depressing practical reality of the wireless world that even Apple cannot break the cabal and catalyze the wireless industry to flourish amid an internet-style openness. Apple is attempting to preserve the “lock” on its customers because carriers have a lock on the market. And we cannot expect Apple to lose money for the benefit of the greater community in the interests of strong-arming the carriers.

Or can we? If they don’t, then Google might. The GoogPhone has become the new source of promise for we proletariat who formerly clicked our heels together and begged for Apple to bust the wireless industry cabal. Google has the altruism, the mandate, and the heft to push the carriers around much moreso than RIM or Apple. It is also going after spectrum, as we all know. Even if it gets it, this doesn’t mean it will use it, because it’ll become a substantial bargaining chip when it approaches carriers to provide distribution and access for its devices.

So Apple might be getting a short-term spike out of its iPhone product line only to be subverted by Google, which will represent an interesting conflict-of-interest for Google CEO and Apple Board Member Eric Schmidt. If that’s the case, then Apple has forfeited a long-term future in the mobile world in an effort to work within, rather than challenge, the fundamental realities of the wireless industry.

In the meantime, el-Steve-o is talking pretty tough to the iPhone unlocking crowd (which, let’s face it, is now probably approaching the majority of iPhone users). Of course, Jobs could be borrowing a page from Yasser Arafat: talking tough when his constituency (the carriers) are listening but sliding back-handed messages of peace (and unfettered use of iPhones) under the table. If there’s a volume horizon when the cost of producing iPhones becomes less than they’re forced to sell them for sometime in Apple’s future, then this is quite possible.

The fundamental problem here is that being an open platform in an interconnected world is about more than just having an open device, like a PC. In fact, PCs have gotten a free ride of sorts because the Internet via broadband has always been more-or-less unencumbered. Wireless is just the opposite, and even devices like the OpenMoko will still be tethered within the Wireless Egosystem, until carriers stop caring about how much data you use and where you use it.

The problem is: will they ever?

Despite vehement denials and warnings from Rogers spokespeople, I have it on slightly better authority from an unnameable closer-to-the-source Rogers employee that the date for launching the Rogers iPhone in Canada will land in December — making those overnight lineups outside the Apple Store so much more pleasant!

It is, however, unclear to me whether this will be the impotent 2.5G iPhone a la AT&T, or the kick-ass 3G iPhone rumoured to be teeing up to launch in Europe in October. Launching a 3G iPhone in Canada that is rather unlocked would be great for T-Mobile and other U.S. GSM carriers, such as they are, because it’d allow people to hook up an iPhone to existing GSM accounts with other service providers, despite AT&T‘s rumoured two-year exclusivity lockout.

What most of the hysterical journalists I have read in the past few weeks have overlooked is that the iPhone is a service, and not just a device: there are provisioning systems, security standards, and feature interactions (specifically, the visual voicemail tool is not exactly out-of-the-box wireless voicemail technology) which are client-server and which require service providers to deploy network equipment to coincide with the iPhone launch. Some carriers’ architectures will lend themselves better to this than others. So it’s not simply a case of getting the handsets, and some carriers are more stuffy than others about third-party hardware and protocols riding in their network.

In this sense, iPhone is interesting not just because it’s a cool, game-changing device .. but moreso because it’s the first fundamentally new network approach to break down the bunker doors to the wireless carriers metro switching networks since RIM. And as Richard McManus points out, it’s a platform that’s carrying a lot more applications than just email.

In the meantime, insofar as wireless device crazes go, the iPhone has big shoes to fill in outselling the RAZR.

It also means that the current raft of criticism lobbed toward Apple (and toward the irrational exuberance of Apple investors hoping that Apple will turn the mobile biz on its ear) is largely a criticism of AT&T Wireless, and the limitations of a combination of the AT&TW network and the structure of the deal they likely struck with Apple.

Apple’s not stupid. They’re betting big on GSM and GSM-based 3G wireless. The unlocked “TriPhones”, available in Europe (possibly also in Canada?) come this October, will be the items to have. If you buy an iPhone this weekend then you’re going to lose a lot of value very quickly.