Anyone familiar with this blog, with me, or with my company will know that I am passionate about a few things – including my steadfast belief that global telcos and broadband service providers – despite being underdogs in the fight against facebook -- possess a unique and powerful legacy that makes them very capable of becoming a serious player in the race to blend online advertising and social networking.
Over the past few years a number of different people – mainly VCs -- have reminded me that Telcos have a horrible track record of delivering application services innovation – and it would be much wiser to build SMBLive by taking our application services directly to the market. A direct quote from one person was “don’t weigh yourselves down with telco bureaucracy”.
To be fair, I certainly understand and appreciate the perspective, especially when I continue to read fascinating articles like this one published on the cover of this week’s issue of Information Week. The story recaps how the world’s telco giants – fat, dumb, and slow – gathered in Monte Carlo this past spring for some fun – and, oh yeah, highly strategic planning pertaining to IP Multimedia Subsystem, or IMS -- the technology that big telcos had once identified as the platform for creating web based applications quickly and easily. According to Graham Finnie, author of the article, IMS was the long awaited savior that would “enable telcos to finally escape their dependence on a handful of commodity services”. Yet for all its benefits, IMS has been slow to progress into practical reality. Simultaneously, outside the telco castle walls, web innovation has progressed at lightning speed.
Finney remind us that Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the Facebook Platform just 4 weeks after the ill fated telco gathering in Monaco and suggests that Facebook is the perfect surrogate for the types of issues that inherently prevent telcos from rapidly innovating. It’s a well told and fascinating story that I happen to agree with on many levels – especially the conclusion which suggests that despite the rapid rise of Facebook in the midst of continued telco stagnation – the game is far from over.
Consider innovative new services such as
BT Tradespace which is a simple way for small businesses to promote themselves on the web so they can attract more customers, sell more things, and manage important relationships with prospects and friends -- with no IT expertise required. Still not convinced, consider what
actual small businesses are saying – “
Tradespace incorporates both an area to advertise, and a community area…BT Tradespace looks like it will be the sort of place to kill two birds with one stone.”
While Telcos continue to struggle with service innovation – it would be a mistake to forget their highly exploitable strengths such as
brand awareness, big balance sheets, millions of customers, and long-standing regulatory privileges. In the end, I continue to believe that telcos in general have what it takes to give Facebook and others a run for their money by blending online advertising and social networking into easy to use service offerings. The question is
who among them are brave enough and fast enough to adapt???