You need to stop thinking you are a walled garden, as me and 40 million of your customers are thinking of leaving you so we can go have fun with the iPhone. The only thing holding me back are the horror stories of the AT&T network… but the minute that is fixed – I’m outta here.

Consider this some really cheap customer research. A million expensive BREW apps are not going to save you…

650.xxx.xxxx

For some, it’s really about being #1 distributing apps, about having the most developers. For others, it’s more modestly about filling a gap in their offering, so when Joe Consumer walks into Radio Shack and before buying a phone asks “You guys got apps to go with this?” the salesgirl can reasonable say “Yup, we sure do.” and so she closes the deal. App stores sometimes are offensive moves, and sometimes they are very valid defensive moves.

Apps as a retail model are early in their evolution. In some cases (e.g. 3, SonyEricsson) an in-house app store is launched, not with the intent to recruit every developer on the planet, but to recruit only a select few for a specific boutique store that enhances the value of some other service. Sometimes these stores are augmented by 3rd parties, in an “app mall”, sometimes not.

Blackberry, LG, Microsoft, Palm, Apple, and others continue to experiment with new merchandising, on device experiences, geographical emphasis, payments options, etc, as do we at GetJar (which we believe, by volume, is #2 only to Apple.)

Eventually, the apps business may be as complex as any physical retail business, with specialists, mass market horizontal plays, boutiques, etc. all existing happily in parallel. Complexity is likely, since with apps, we are opening up the business from a reliance the totally on paid content of the Handango/carrier deck model, to many new free content business models, which themselves require innovative technical and marketing distribution solutions.

The handset world is a fragmented world. It’s likely that the app store world will be fragmented too. This is a new challenge for retailers.

We should thank Verizon for their work, even if it’s only an experiment, a defensive play, given the resources they’ve committed to it, and given the insight that their success, or failure, will lend to the apps community.

To judge every app store, every app strategy, by one standard is to miss the complex evolution of this new retail business.

Oh, and good luck finding those developers.

Seriously carriers: data, voice, sms. That’s all we ever want from you. You are boring ugly carriers with a track record for lack of ingenuity and poorly executed product ideas, do the basics, the world will do the rest.

Seriously. Have the Verizon people not been watching the smartphone market AT ALL? This has to be the most tone-deaf thing I’ve seen a carrier do since AT&T said they won’t have MMS ready for the iPhone because of their own database ineptitude.

Multiple devices and OS’es supported by one app store will be the most fragmented and useless POS ever.

A model of efficiency for that announcement – assuming the intent was to drive their good customers away…