This week saw the launch of the catchily titled Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) at Mobile World Congress – an attempt by mobile operators to gain some share of the action within the burgeoning mobile applications space. Whilst not all of the horses have bolted, the mobile operators have some serious catching up to do and have probably already lost a large proportion of premium customers (those mostly like to buy apps in the first place) to handset manufacturers.

For years the mobile operators gave us their version of the internet and we didn’t like it very much. Walled gardens and nothing that could remotely be called ‘cool’. So convincing us that the future of apps lies with them could be a hard sell. The strength that handset operators have is the direct relationship with their customers but will this be enough? Turn on any smart phone from the likes of Blackberry, Apple or Android-based and automatically you’re routed to their view of the applications world. Perhaps the best operators can hope for is to corner legacy users with old handsets. However, that opens up even more questions – compatibility, how to coordinate 24 operators, how to market it and who is going to bother to develop for it when we have four arguably more lucrative platforms running now in the form of Apple, Android, Ovi and Blackberry.