I think the fact that Wal-Mart is now selling the G1 Google Android phone for about 30 bucks less than direct is the next divisive issue in national politics.

Given that this election in its final days has been reduced to a number of stereotypical, often alliterative demographics (moose moms, anyone?), I think Sarah Palin in particular should pick up Wal-Mart selling the G1 as a microcosm for the battle lines being drawn.

I have to say, it’s an innovative retail strategy on the part of T-Mobile, making Wal-Mart the exclusive discounter nationwide, in terms of cannibalization. In other words, I would imagine T-Mobile retail stores aren’t exactly throwing a party over this development. I think T-Mobile’s simply hedging its bets. But I think it’s also further proof that high-end handsets, the ones that can really make that vision of Internet-everywhere come true, are making a very serious play for the mass market — no newsflash there, but with the economy the way it is, getting the masses to react might not be so easy.

Take the iPhone. It’s everywhere thanks to a mass-market ad strategy, but let’s face it: AT&T provides the network but you have to get the iPhone from Apple. It’s all kind of prep-school elitish. The Mac guy is the guy that reads the New York Times, drinks lattes, watches MSNBC and probably looks really, totally hip. An Obama supporter, most likely. The kind of guy that Joe Six-Pack would probably like to beat up. The kind of guy I would have dated in college.

T-Mobile and Google are going after another America, the average America, the one the campaigns are throwing down hard for. There’s no pretentiousness here, no air of rarified wonkishness. Just drop by Wal-Mart, pick up a giant jar of pickles and your G1, and off you go, presumably to eat pickles and Google stuff at the same time. Pickles aside, T-Mobile’s speaking the language of the average American — Joe the Plumber, Wally the Wal-Marter. The kind of person Sarah Palin condones as a real American (she could shine here: “Don’t run off and get yourself one of those popular, East Coast liberal phones! Go rogue with the G1!”).

But then, the Wal-Mart G1 purchaser is also the kind of person Barack Obama sees as indicative of the plight of the middle class. So there’s an in for him there too.

So goes the G1, so goes the country?

Incidentally, my cousin worked for a high-end spice company and his specified job was to sell to Wal-Mart. And sell he did — he had to. Wal-Mart accounts for an overwhelming percentage of his company’s sales (and an overwhelming percentage of a lot of companies’ sales) — so losing them as a distribution outlet would be disastrous. The problem is that Wal-Mart said he needed to lower his wholesale rates and create a specific Wal-Mart-only brand, or else they wouldn’t carry the product anymore. The cost of the new brand creation combined with lower price points meant that his company was actually LOSING money on the deal until a certain volume was reached, and even then the profits were not what they should have and could have been. Does this ring faintly of Sprint’s Nextel woes?

Anyway, short story shorter, my cousin’s commissions were slashed accordingly and he found himself having to ... you guessed it, shop at Wal-Mart to make ends meet. It’s a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t, vicious cycle.

This cloud computing thing (I use way too much tech lingo, don’t you think?) is a thorny issue, dear readers. And the briar patch just got thicker with Microsoft Corp.’s launch of the Windows Azure operating system, designed to be hosted in Microsoft data centers and accessed via the Internet in order to tap third-party services and applications using a wide range of Azure-compatible enterprise endpoints. Is it that big of a deal? Eh, maybe.

We’ve seen “cloudiness” before, in the form of IP Centrex, the ill-fated ASP bubble, Salesforce.com, managed infrastructure, hosted services, data center virtualization, Amazon’s pioneering cloud initiatives, widgets and on and on. How many native applications do you have running on your PC? MS Office, sure. What else? Think about it. Is this such a revolutionary concept? No.

That said, you have to consider what it means that the big M-to-the-S-to-the-F-to-the-T is in da cloud computing house. There are a few points to make, and I’m going to bullets because it’s easier, I’m feeling lazy, and I have a cover story to finish:

1) This is a massive bolster for the world of cloud computing, and one that might take it into commodity territory. Microsoft is entrenched. It owns the enterprise environment no matter how many creative departments remain Mac outposts. Developers and IT folk are already very comfortable with Microsoft APIs and tools, which will remain familiar in Azure. MSFT is putting its considerable weight behind the shift from on-premise enterprise computing infrastructure to relying on remote data centers and networked architectures and online access. It means that shift is real, it has arrived.

2) While others have tried to kick-start the remote service model with varying degrees of success, Microsoft is offering a de facto standard platform for enabling the delivery of hosted services in a trusted environment. It’s important to make a big delineation note here: It’s not about Microsoft getting further into hosted services, though it will almost certainly look forward to SaaS revenues on Office, unified communications and more. It’s also about Microsoft becoming the ubiquitous enabler, foundation, rock of Gibraltar for such services, because developers as mentioned will be writing for Azure.

3) What’s in it for Microsoft, aside from having a horse in a popular race? For one, it’s obviously solidifying its operating system hegemony by covering both on- and off-premise approaches. Also, the software biz is a dismal one right now. There’s plenty of freeware, plenty of pay-as-you-go services and plenty of margin squeezing going on out there. Azure has the potential to ultimately cannibalize Microsoft’s desktop software business, but that’s probably not much of a problem. Especially considering that MSFT executives hinted that Azure might also be monetized with an advertising model. Advertising has made a lot of companies a lot of money, and Microsoft probably wants a piece of that. And that reminds me, Azure is also erecting a firewall against what is emerging as Microsoft’s top rival: that company in Mountain View, you know, the one with the search empire, Internet application market corner and the new mobile operating system that puts Windows Mobile to shame? Google Inc. has the potential to make Microsoft, with its premise-based, native software-focused old school ways, look passé, even stodgy. Microsoft has to adapt, and with businesses being the lone area Google doesn’t focus on, this is a good entry point to prove that it can do just that.

Incidentally, whenever I think of Google and Microsoft, I can hear Bill Gates, from retirement, shaking his fist and uttering something like Capt. Kirk’s desperate “Khaaaaaaan!!” in the Wrath of Khan, vowing to put things right.

4) All of this is pure gold for the savvy service provider willing to crash this whole party, both for providing that bandwidth and those data center services, but also as third-party application providers. Offering hosted services is one thing; offering hosted services backed up by a trusted, known infrastructure is another. One casualty might be storage vendors though, since Microsoft plans to host all Azure infrastructure and services itself. If the majority of remotely hosted enterprise services go to Azure, well ... do the math.

5) You have to consider that there will be push-back. Enterprises, especially privacy-sensitive verticals like financial services and health care, are loathe to relinquish control over their infrastructure. But in a down economy, avoiding capex in favor of opex looks like a pretty good trade ... oh wait, except when the short-term credit that pays for opex dries up, which it has. Hmm. On the other side, there’s this: Gartner Inc. expects sales for remotely accessed enterprise applications to surpass $6.4 billion in 2008, a 27 percent increase from last year’s revenue of $5.1 billion. And that market is expected to more than double by 2012.

Mobile applications are here but, no one knows what the hell to do with them. Put another way, it’s a bit of an app dance, if you will: lots of excitement, not a lot of consummation.

The rise of the profile of the mobile application is of course due to a confluence of factors that are getting kind of tired to talk about: one, devices built for applications are coming to market (BlackBerry Storm, the new T-Mobile USA/Google Android G1 handset, the Sony-Ericsson Xperia, OK I’m starting to fall asleep). And networks are getting faster. Carriers are learning the walled garden’s days are well and truly numbered and are embracing development ecosystems, and developers like the prospect of getting a piece of the mobile user’s wallet. The Apple App Store has been a success. So far, so good.

But...there’s no clarity as to how the islands of development will come together so that a T-Mobile customer can video share with a Verizon Wireless subscriber. Interoperability is the linchpin to new services: Look at SMS. And how do we facilitate Web apps effectively across a range of devices and OS, for that matter? How can we manage those applications and content from a DRM and security perspective, and how can we enable functionality without installing a battery-draining client on the handset? Other concerns include whether consumers — and enterprises, for that matter ─ will bite, user interface obstacles (Gawd, remember WAP portals? Shudder), and what it means for networks and the operators balancing the cost of delivering data with the ARPU that comes with it (I’m sorry, anyone else bitter about text messaging going up to 20 cents per message? Because I AM). And, how will all the stakeholders ultimately get paid?

These questions loom, but everyone’s in a bit of an overhyped frenzy over the “opportunity,” and yet just stabbing in the dark, about how to monetize mobile apps. The chicken-with-head-cut-off nature of mobile app business modeling is one of my takeaways from Mobile Internet World (MIW) last week in Boston.

So was the effect of the economic crisis. MIW was chock full of carriers and device-makers and software platform types making pitches that boiled down to: “Please, Mr. or Ms. Developer, come and code for us! We’re fiscally sound, promise!”

Clearly the economic jitters have the nascent mobile app community in a bit of a disarray, with developers wondering where to spend their time, and clearly this is not lost on the increasingly growing number of companies starting third-party ecosystems in the wake of the success of the Apple App Store and the iPhone. This is judging from the number of presentations that a friend noted sounded more like venture capital fundraising presentations than anything else. This was also evident in the complete lack — I mean, not even one scrap — of exhibitor news out of the show. Sure, there were only a handful of exhibitors, but really, couldn’t someone have come up with something, just for kicks? No one wants to stick the neck out, I think.

Fascinating game of one-upmanship. I especially liked, or, er, noted with involuntary Gen-X sarcasm, Opera Software’s CEO, Jon S. von Tetzchner, who just cut to the chase with a dog-and-pony show on Opera widgets and why the company is “the best,” not to mention financially solvent in case you didn’t know. Jon didn’t even pretend to nominally address the session’s ostensible educational focus on connecting mobile content with the user. Trends? What? Booooooring! Let me tell you about how great Opera is instead! And there were even T-shirts available, just in case you wanted to become part of the viral marketing effort. I wanted to hear about how Opera sees open source as solving some of the aforementioned issues. Instead, I stopped short of stabbing a pencil into my arm to stay awake.

And there goes any hope for a conversation with Opera. Sorry Jon. I love ya, babe. You know I do.

Meanwhile, look at the plight of the target customer trying to suss out this potentially intriguing new world of apps. You know how the new G1 is only $179 plus a cheap data plan and it’s all thin and cool and touchscreeny and stuff and sounds like a screaming deal? In fact, Ian McKerlich, director of mobile Web and content services at T-Mobile noted the pricing (“for existing customers” and “why would anyone wait on it”) in his keynote at MIW. Which caused an involuntary eye roll in yours truly because I checked into the G1, being an existing T-Mobile customer, and to acquire the ultimately useful device will set me back $400. Oh, sorry, $349.99 with the online discount and a 2-year contract extension.

I can get the iPhone for $200 if I switch to AT&T. Of course, then I end up paying $150 to get out of my T-Mobile contract, which still has a year to go, so what’s the point? I work in technology, obviously, and would very much like to be able to look up, say, directions to the nearest pumpkin patch while out and about and enjoying fall with my six-year-old, so I don’t have to run home to do so. But here’s the rub: It’s not worth $350 to me to be able to do so. It’s a tease. An app-dance.

Is there a lesson in there, mobile application ecosystem partners? Methinks so...