AT&T was good at seeing the future, not at executing on it…

19 Jun

A few weeks back at the Alcatel Lucent analyst event, author Douglas Coupland treated us to a post-dinner speech on visions of the future. It was an interesting moment, but the highlight for me was these video adverts that he showed from AT&T back in 1993.

What's really interesting to me is that if you project back, it took a fair bit of vision to actually anticipate some of these changes, and if you look closely, every single one of them came true. What's even more interesting to me is that AT&T (or more generally telcos) have virtually no stake in any of those. I've compiled a table to look at who is the key player for each of these. 

Attroles
What's fascinating to me is that the common view of why telcos are not part of these ecosystems is that they didn't have the vision, others (google, skype, etc.) were more visionary, etc. That's clearly not the case: if AT&T was bold enough in 1993 to advertised for services they could clearly see were being worked on in Bell Labs at the time, it's because they felt they would be services they could deliver. 

So why couldn't they? My guess is because of vertical integration. These services, for the most part, needed an open network to access a broad market, and that's the one thing that the internet brought to us not because of telcos role but despite telcos resistence and reluctance. This (to me) is a great way to drive home the point that the incumbent's push (through ITU) to end openness in the name of control (and perceived revenue) is not only misguided, it's suicidal. For the companies themselves, and for our modern societies. I'll write more about that later this week, but I thought these ads were a great illustration of that. 

In conclusion, one could say: "And the company that'll bring it to you? Not a telco…"

  • Steve

    These services require 3 things (i) hardware (ii) software (iii) connectivity
    hardware and software are closely tied together (always have been, and always will be)
    Though the invention of the internet has meant that connectivity is completely decoupled. This means that connectivity providers have almost zero role in services
    If you look at telco competencies they are (i) managing a network* (ii) marketing, and (iii) maybe billing?
    When it comes to the network they have no real expertise in the network equipment side of it either. They buy off the shelf equipment and just configure it to their network
    Maybe just focus upon offering great connectivity services and then forget about all the services that they are not experts at

  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0120a54b786c970b twitter.com/aswath

    Being somebody who was in the midst of these things, my take is that we Bellheads were firmly married to Virtual circuits, global interoperability and works perfectly. Consequently the idea has to be a “perfect storm”. This is in contrast to Internet mindset of best-effort, gradual adoption and “good-enough”.