Further to our thoughts on who owns the customer, Jan Rezab on the MobileGamesBlog has pitched in with their ideas on what the networks really think of the rise of manufacturer's app stores. In short they feel that the networks have been lazy, and now the challenge of OEM stores is here they need to sort this out and use their unique selling points – a direct relationship with billing mechanisms already in place – to create the app stores that customers have wanted for years.

But the question now is - will operators tolerate this? They have entire departments built on mobile content revenues, and will they want to just give this away to device manufacturers? This is a big question. If I was in the position of a mobile operators mobile content department, pretty much now would be the time I would wake up, and start taking actions - and start pushing device manufacturers to start “behaving”, and delivering the devices with the proper links and preinstalled homepages to their own. Question is, if mobile manufacturers will respect this...

The full discussion can be found on the MobileGamesBlog.