It's with great pleasure that I read about Apple opening up the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch platforms to developers this week.  This move surely is due to pressure from the iPhone user community (and trying to keep up the the Microsoft Mobile developer community)

If you participated in my session at Internet Telephony this January, you know how strongly I believe this is a big deal.  History has shown over and over again that allowing the creative minds of application developers to fill market needs is the best way to expand the market and build new solutions.  Imagine what life would be like If you limited application development to the AT&T and IBMs of the 70's?  You'd still have plain-old-dialtone and IBM 3720 terminals on our desks.  No Google, no Wikipedia, no Linux. 

This is also why I think IMS is a huge mistake.  IMS is based on the concept that the carriers will develop and deploy all the applications.   The carriers should stick to managing the core of the network and delivering services over the last mile.  Letting the Google, Microsoft and smaller developers of the world create applications is a far better way to great applications deployed quickly. 

Still don't believe me?  How long do you think it will take to create the equivalent of Google Maps for my Verizon phone?  Years (if ever).

I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes next for the iPhone and family!