The “notorious” Marc Canter has written a piece called Breaking the Web Wide Open! in which he talks about the difficulties facing larger companies when it comes to opening access to their data, the nub being:

Should they adopt these tools and standards, painfully cannibalizing their existing revenue for a new unproven concept, or should they stick with their currently lucrative model with the risk that eventually a bunch of upstarts eat their lunch?

He also points out where he thinks all the interesting developments will be taking place:

Identity
Attention
Open Media
Microcontent Publishing
Open Social Networks
Tags
Pinging
Routing
Open Communications
Device Management and Control

which sounds reasonable enough. Anyway, overall the article is a nice overview of openness, where’s it been, where it is now, where it’s going and what to keep an eye on.