Is AT&T Building the Ultimate Walled Garden? 102
itwbennett writes "The announcement earlier this week that AT&T joined OpenStack was greeted with much fanfare (of the 'woo hoo for open source' variety). But dig into why AT&T decided to sign up for OpenStack and things get a lot more interesting. 'AT&T is about to take on Amazon's EC2 and S2 cloud services, and OpenStack's technology is going to be the engine that drives it,' writes blogger Brian Profit. 'Leaving aside the potential problems for user privacy here — and oh, there are many to be addressed to be sure — a plan such as this would represent a stunning coup for AT&T, since they would be able to provide the one thing Apple and Google have not been able to have in their respective plans to own the entire stack: the network on which all communications must flow.'"
Shai Hulud wills it! (Score:5, Funny)
The data must flow. He who controls the stack, controls the universe.
Re:Shai Hulud wills it! (Score:5, Funny)
The data must flow. He who controls the stack, controls the universe.
"You can't stop the signal, Mal. Everything goes somewhere, and I go everywhere. "
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Funny)
How is this "the ultimate walled garden"? There are no walls. Are they going to stop customers using the iPhone App Store and the Android Market Place and force them all to use/purchase their new "apps"? That'll go down well.
According to TFA,
it would be like CompuServe, if CompuServe owned the phone company.
So, I'm envisioning this as a text based BBS running at 1200 baud over copper POTS. I really didn't realize that AT&T had a strong retro streak, but the longer I think about it, the more it makes sense.
Using analog modems at 1200 baud was the last time that AT&T managed to keep up with the data flow. It went downhill from there....