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.'"
Good luck with that (Score:4, Informative)
Having used their hosting services, I'd be surprised if they could offer anything that would minimally verge on competition, except the part about them owning the wires too. Their hosting servers were abysmal, email sucked and IIRC then - it was cleartext passwords for email accounts. Unless they significantly added/fostered talent in the systems administration I don't think buying themselves into the market will help.