Except for Apple, who have done very well. They have not compromised to most carrier concerns, you don't find an ATT logo on the iPhone, or dodgy software apps you can't remove, or hardware switched off. Apple has done more to change the carriers than anyone else.

Sure, they have had to pull some apps (although both ATT and Apple deny it was due to the carrier).

Apple has only one single carrier in the US, so how many carriers did they exactly change?. Did they start to sell unlocked GSM/CDMA phones to anyone who wanted?

As the article states

"ban cool apps for no real reason (Google Voice on the iPhone for one), cripple apps to protect business models (Skype on the iPhone) and outright ban data-heavy apps from third parties (Slingbox for the iPhone), all the while promoting their own app (MLB’s iPhone app)."

Looks like compromise to me, all in its best interest of course.

Maybe you are forgetting what it would be like before Apple? Carriers would regularly disable bluetooth or downloading. You could only get apps from their store. You could only get ringtones from their store. etc...

Apple changed all carriers, since they are less locked down. On Android, you can get apps from the google marketplace, not just the carrier store. Ringtones can be had easily.

Nonsense. I had a windows mobile phone, and could do all of those things. In hindsight, windows mobile had a pretty awful user interface, but it wasn't apple that caused those things to happen.