Verizon Wireless has changed course and now decided to embrace the Android platform that gained so much media attention a few weeks back. This comes on the heals of their announcement to "open up" their network to devices that they didn't sell the customer. According to a BusinessWeek report, these moves are motivated by the need to win more and more customers. The wireless industry is going through a major shift right now, as there business model has always been based on everything feeding new subscribers. This model is eventually going to falter when the market becomes fully saturated.

Verizon's store employees used to spend most of their time servicing new customers each day. Now they are spending only 10% of their time on new customers, and that's a lot of overhead to maintain. As the wireless carriers now feed on winning customers from one another, they need to start becoming more "customer friendly" to keep the ones they have. I believe that the move to support Android is motivated by this need. Hopefully this will be a trend that continues into other areas, most notably the thought of rolling out numerous upgrades to existing PDAPhone owners over the course of the devices useful life.

Now we have three of the big four US carriers in the Android camp - Sprint-Nextel, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless. Will AT&T Wireless follow along and complete the deal, or will they hold out to see if the Android thing is for real. They of course are still riding the iPhone wave, but that can't last forever.