Two days back Brain McConnell wrote a guest column damning the current nature of telecom business captioning it with the lead line from the ballad made famous by Johnny Paycheck. In that post, Brain laments the fact that there are no more profitable niches and all services “have become low-margin commodity markets dominated by established companies.” Even the mobile space is not encouraging till the carriers open their platform and have meaningful revenue sharing program. Given the gloomy evaluation, Brian has decided to move away from the telecom business.
Predictably, those who are still in the telecom business, like Moshe Maeir and Pat Phelan have taken exception to his conclusion. Moshe suggests in a comment, that there is a great promise in applications that treat voice as a component. I agree that we can do a lot by mashing voice with other components and create cool and useful applications. I suspect that Brian will not disagree as well. But the question is whether these applications require a service provider model. In a comment, Scott Rafer raises the same point by quoting the Stupid Network paper.
Of course this paper also suggests that the industry has ignored developing meaningful and intelligent Ends that have sophisticated UI. Brian himself raises the point in a follow-up comment but dismisses it by saying, “the UI is fundamentally limited to doing phone-like things.” How can he say that in this year of Apple iPhone? Even the demo video suggests how easy it is to put a call on hold or retrieve a call. Contrast this to a device like PhoneGnome, which is otherwise a feature rich device. Because of the limited UI, it has to restrict concurrent VoIP and PSTN calls it can present to the user. How many devices provide a mechanism to specify the subject of a call or to escalate the communication from a chat session, to a voice session and then video if necessary?
No, I am staying in the telecom business, but with a special focus on the Ends.
Posted by aswath at December 26, 2007 03:00 PM