Stardust Global Ventures

There’s a nightmare running in my brain that’s really bothering me. The best way to make the frightening visions in by head subside is to talk about it here, so hang on dear readers.

The most recent fodder for this particular topic is my good friend Andy’s Scouting Report: The Players to Pick To Build & Grow A 2.0 Telco/Carrier/Service Provider. That led to my response in Andy’s Picks for 2.0 Telco/Carrier/Service, but this is something bigger.

In tandem with the whole VoIP is Dead/Alive meme that’s circulating (see my Speaking the Unspeakable – VoIP and Sheryl’s Open Invitation to VoIP: Dead or Alive), this subject tracks back farther. A few weeks ago I wrote Extinction Events Don’t Just Hit the Yucatán Peninsula, but that’s not the beginning of this for me. It’s not the beginning of this for anyone.

I can easily trace my own thinking on this subject back through the dot com bubble bursting, but if I think hard enough, my own conscious thinking about this date to the 80s. If we need a specific date, I’ll say August 5, 1983 when Judge Harold Greene signed the final consent decree to break up the old Bell System.

I’ve been involved in Internet activity for a long time. Since before we called it the Internet. I’ve been involved in telecommuncations since 1980, and paid my dues at the University of Alexander Graham with Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, then AT&T, then Lucent Technologies. I’ve hoed a row or two down that field.

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of talk, far too much talk, about the concept of Telco 2.0 and it’s driving me a bit insane. The constructs of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 are fabrications of software writers (and sellers) and simply don’t exist. Telco 1.0 was represented by the logo above and it died 25 years ago. And on that day I remember observing to a colleague that the elephant had been shot, but it would run a long way before it realized it was dead and feel over. it’s still running, but it’s dead.

I find the idea of Telco 2.0 an anathema to good business sense. I know the carriers all want to be Telco 2.0, but why? If I extend my Yucatan event analogy a bit, the Mastadon was simply Elephant 1.0. It’s gone and pretty much forgotten, but why on earth would you aim to become Elephant 2.0, the pachyderm that’s shrinking in population today? To what end? Why would you aim to become a slow, lumbering beast of burden that’s faced with extinction on the horizon?

I’ll posit that the very concept of Telco 2.0 is flawed at its core and such an enterprise can never exist. I think my dear friend Moshe Maeir agreed with me today when he wrote Can you teach a telecom guy – software based communications?

I will speculate that there will never be a Telco 2.0 It cannot come into being because its time is already past, by 20 years. Telco 2.0 would predate the Internet dot com bubble burst.

I think that’s why I balked at Andy’s idea of the talented roster of guys he picked as draft picks for the Telco 2.0 All Stars. I absolutely agree about the talent, even genius of the people he mentioned. But to put them into the already extinct construct of a Telco 2.0 fabrication would be to consign them to the seventh level of hell (or deeper).

There’s a company I won’t name, but it’s a company that Sheryl and I are beginning some work with. We’re optimistic about where that work will lead and how we can help them. In some ways they come from the distant past. Their language is filled with acronyms reminiscent of the ice age (ILEC, IXC, CLEC, etc.). I mention this for a reason. They are most decidely not a telco. Some of their employess might think they are, but they’re wrong. Even to their roots, this company is not a telco. Some of their leadership team has some telco history, but we’ll forgive that because they are not clinging to the past, but rather looking to the future.

Moshe asked if you can teach a telecom guy software based communications. It’s an interesting question, but it makes me wonder why you’d want to in the first place. Can you teach the hardware and software guy that neither works without the other? To succeed in the Internet Communications Continuum you really need to look at the solutions you deliver and even thinking in terms of unified communications is backwards thinking? That’s right, the guy who’s been writing about unified communications for the past few years just called it backwards thinking.

Jeff nailed it most accurately the other day when he used the term Internet Communications Continuum in a post. There’s a difference between a continuum and a timeline. In the continuum, the incremental time elements don’t matter. In the continuum we’re talking about the evolution from Bell System to telecom to unified communications to the future was distrupted by something we now call social media. Social media is a bigger disrupter than any technology I’ve seen in my 55 years, but I’m not sure we all get that just yet.

One of the best descriptions of social media I’ve seen anywhere comes from AN iCrossing eBook entitled What is Social Media? It says:

Social media is best understood as a group of new kinds of online media, which share most or all of the following characteristics:

• Participation: social media encourages contributions and feedback from everyone who is interested. It blurs the line between media and audience.
• Openness: most social media services are open to feedback and participation. They encourage voting, comments and the sharing of information. There are rarely any barriers to accessing and making use of content – password-protected content is frowned on.
• Conversation: whereas traditional media is about “broadcast? (content transmitted or distributed to an audience) social media is better seen as a two-way conversation.
• Community: social media allows communities to form quickly and communicate effectively. Communities share common interests, such as a love of photography, a political issue or a favourite TV show.
• Connectedness: Most kinds of social media thrive on their connectedness, making use of links to other sites, resources and people.

Five words that do not describe telecommunications or the telecom industry – Participation, Openness, Conversation, Community and Connectedness. The industry, the whole construct of that framework is to control four of those by ensuring there is no community in the first place. To embrace community is not to become Telco 2.0, but to create something entirely new.

Sheryl and I are at the edge of something new, and it’s earthshaking. I’ve said many times the dinosaurs have died. I’ll repeat that the dinosaurs are dead. In the physical world, they aren’t only dead, we’ve just about extracted all the fossil fuel we’ll ever suck out of the planet. In the field of communications, we’re just now dipping in a straw to begin draining the value they quit adding to human communications of very long ago. It’s time to feed on the dead carcasses of those ancients who no longer roam the earth. And just as a coecelanth is an irrelevant relative of the dinosaurs that still exists, it’s time to recognize that the entire construct we call a Telco is simply not relevant to society, business or the world today.

Those companies aiming to become Telco 2.0 are already doomed because the worst thing that can happen to them is to hit the mark. Imagine the agony of working to achieve prehistoric ignominy and defeat at the jaws of a fierce new predator that’s smaller, faster, more adaptable and built to evolve.

The Next Generation Company in the Internet Communications Continmuum is out there. There’s more than one. They’re young in spirit, but old in wisdom. I’ve talked about some of them before. They aren’t in the Fortune 100. They aren’t in the Fortune 500. And beyond that, they aren’t focused on getting there or serving that market.  They’re the technology leaders of the “Unfortunate 5 Million” who look at the real world market, and they’re gaining momentum.

What would you call them? I won’t insult them by thinking in terms of Telco 2.0. I won’t call them unified communications companies, because that’s too limiting. They aren’t social media companies because they simply embrace social media as a way to participate in the global economy of the information age.

They’re the next generation connectors. Connecting people and resources. They’re builders. They’re future thinkers. They assimilate, aggregate and deliver. And we know how to help them. It’s time for some holistic medicine in creating this new industry. In telecommunications and networking we have been our own worst enemies long enough. It’s time to quit carrying those flawed, narrow constructs along and think in new terms.

Technorati Tags: Andy Abramson, Jeff Pulver, Moshe Maeir, Telco 2.0, telecommuncations, dinosaurs, Bell System, Internet Communications Continuum, scoail media, unified communications, There is no Telco 2.0, There can never be Telco 2.0 , It’s time for something new