For the longest time I was puzzled by how many people I know who carry both an iPhone and a plain-old regular mobile phone. As I’ve come to understand the real reason for this seemingly bizarre behavior, however, I realize that it isn’t bizarre at all: it’s brilliant. And it speaks volumes about the future of the telecommunications industry.

The iPhone and what it represents to the market helps me understand this emerging concept of “Web 2.0” that everybody is talking about. It’s powerful, amazing, and threatens to redefine the concept of service delivery.

The iPhone brings a radically different user experience. The customer can download applications on-demand from what is essentially an endless supply (the last time I looked, there were well over 100,000 of them at Apple’s Apps Store, many of them free), so their network adapts to the customer. This represents a very different service model indeed.

The model falls under an emerging philosophy of service delivery known variously as Web 2.0, Web-Based Services, and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). It’s quite elegant, and it makes it possible for each user to achieve an extraordinary degree of customization, which in turn creates extraordinary value for each user. There are no losers in the equation.

The model relies on the Internet as a fundamental part of its underlying infrastructure, so a naturally efficient market emerges. The model is not based on traditional, well-behaved, linear supply chains like those that that characterize most businesses. While the market tends to be sloppy and chaotic because of its supply model (the chaos of Open Source development and delivery) and its demand model (pull rather than push, guided by social networking-based recommendations), the Internet steps in to makes it incredibly efficient. This disintermediates the layers and functions that have no relevance in the “hyperchain.”

Harnessing the crowd and taking advantage of the immense knowledge-base it represents demonstrates a new philosophical approach to the delivery of services. Revolutionary thinking? Absolutely. There’s no wonder why users, even those who already have traditional cellphones, can’t get enough.