“May you live in interesting times” is fast becoming an appropriate label for the telecom industry. I opened the London Financial Times today to see 2 headlines that seem to sum up the current plight of telecom - one was the news of Gary Forsee stepping down as CEO of Sprint for not bringing home the bacon in the Sprint / Nextel merger. The other headline was “Google Stock tops $600”.

All sorts of conflicting messages flying around right now. When you are in the middle of one of a major inflexion point for an industry it’s really hard to make out what is happening. After it’s over, it all seems blindingly obvious what was happening but bat the time all sorts of false trails abound.  For example, what are the real implications of the iPhone launch - certainly not just a cool phone.  Apple has such significant market power it can dictate terms to mobile service providers – not just revenue sharing but moving all of the customer’s interaction with the service, such as phone activation, set-up preferences etc to iTunes. Does this presage the emergence of an iPhone service where all of the video and music activity on the phone passes through Apples’ hands with the phone service provider acting as simple bit carrier?

What do we make of the bad news coming out of Alcatel Lucent and even more interestingly the potential for demerger of Nokia Siemens? Does this mean that mergers don’t work? Or are they just hard? Or is it that there remains an underlying weakness in operator spending patterns?

Meanwhile the new kids on the block aren’t having an easy time either. Vonage has had to hand over truck loads of cash to Sprint in settlement of patent infringements; Disney decided to quit the MVNO business and eBay finally woke up to what all of us said a long time ago that they were robbed blind in what they paid for Skype. Not that I’ll hear a word against Skype though, it’s an amazingly service, that pretty much works first time every time, in hi-fi quality, with built-in instant messaging, conference calling etc. And erm… it’s free. Hard to compete with that, better than a phone call and you don’t have to pay.

Meanwhile, despite their motto, I suspect that those nice folks at Google are definitely planning to do evil to the telecom industry. With all of that humongous computing power they are investing in (apparently they bought  around 15% of all of the servers sold worldwide last year and lots of dark fibre), they will certainly be able to do something like Skype but possibly better and probably integrated with lots of other goodies.  Google is already worth more than IBM, so there really isn’t much a company with that kind of buying power can’t do.

So what does it all add up to?  Whatever it is, I doubt it means that the time window is lengthening for telecom to get its cost base down significantly and get new revenue streams flowing. TM Forum has talked for a long time about the operational triple play of integration, transformation and monetisation of the software and processes behind telecom and laid out the frameworks to achieve that.

Time to get on with it methinks.