"Meanwhile, the two biggest telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon, have survived by transforming themselves into software companies, partnering with Apple and oth

"Meanwhile, the two biggest telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon, have survived by transforming themselves into software companies, partnering with Apple and other smartphone makers." It's quite a stretch to call AT&T and Verizon's dominance based on "software". It's actually more than a stretch, it's simply wrong. Those two companies are dominant (to this day, 4 years later) not because of software but despite their desperate and failing attempts to be relevant in the software world. The dominance is quite simply the result of a monopoly on physical resources, in this case, frequencies and large-scale cell tower infrastructure that's hard to copy without huge new investments in ... ahem... hardware.