Well a few weeks break from blogging clears the mind I hope.
So Microsoft fires its canons at Jerry Yang in an attempt to catch Google. Nothing like a $44bn bid to get the pulses of bankers racing. But what does it mean for those of us in the web and communications business? I suppose it means that Microsoft has figured out what Google's strategy is and has a cunning plan to outwit them. But you have to make a lot of assumptions if that's the case.
First you have to assume that Google has a master plan, secondly that Microsoft + Yahoo would have an answer. Just because you are mega rich, doesn't mean you are mega smart. Countless marriages (remember AT&T and NCR; Time Warner and AOL?) end in divorce and acrimony. Clearly Yahoo doesn't like the cut of Mr Ballmer's' jib and is casting around for more acceptable suitors. A telco maybe – AT&T keeps getting mentioned. Erm.
So what is the master plan? Well, as I've said before, all of that investment in processing power, storage and now bandwidth and device resident software has to be going somewhere other than just faster search tools for more people. I think it's about providing an end-end, managed platform on which Google and anyone else can mount applications and seamlessly get to most of the population on the planet through a variety of devices – PC's TV's mobiles and so on with Google in ringmaster seat handling all of the money flows, transactions settlements etc whether ad based or subscription based. At least that ought to be their plan.
But that's a big trick and it takes more than just assembling the raw materials and throwing them together. It's going to take an awful lot of managing across many underlying technologies, countries, legislation; regulatory boundaries. And with fare paying customers whose business will depend on the underlying platform, it will all get very serious when it comes to quality of service and great customer support.
So where are the people who do that for a living today - the world's communications providers? Is this battle of the titans something to watch from afar or is it their livelihood that's being fought over here? What, if anything, can they do about it?
Quite a lot actually. Google and Yahoo, plus Myspace, Facebook etc have all worked out that providing services on a country level doesn't make sense. You have to have a regional or preferably global service play. Provide services that earn small amounts of money from a very large number of people and you make a lot of profit. They have also worked out that consumers prefer to pay nothing, so money has to come from business that want to reach those people – advertising is the most obvious but there are lots of others, governments, health sector companies and so on. That's where the communications business, both telecom and cable fall down. They only usually only provide services where they have network infrastructure – usually a single country or a handful at best. Even multi country giants like Vodafone don't actually provide seamless services – they just happen to be the same owner or part owner of many fragmented providers around the world.
Bad news for fighting players with global markets and stratospheric stock prices. That's because the people who pay Google (the advertisers not the Google users) want access to global markets. So do lots of other people like content providers and so will all sorts of upstream service providers who want to access certain market sectors divided not necessarily by geography by lifestyle, age, needs, wants and so on. Among 6 billion there is probably a perfectly viable market selling special edition woggles to 4 feet tall, left handed, 45 year old ex boy scouts with orange hair. If only you could find them and reach them simply and cheaply wherever they were.
But hang on a minute; don't communications networks cover the entire planet these days? Can't you make a sat phone call from the North Pole if you want to? Yes of course, networks and call services do cover the planet in a grand federation of thousands of service providers. But go beyond that lowest common denominator of voice calls and you‘re screwed. Try lunching content or advertising based services out over the fragmented zoo that is today's mobile and fixed networks. Every service provider works in a different way with different business processes,; different information formats; different screen formats; different commercial arrangement; different quality of service levels and so it goes on. Google' master plan relies on the establishes competition being hopelessly divided – all content providers and advertisers want is an easy life, not hacking though a jungle of technologies, contracts, processes, prejudices and regulations.
So what is the key ingredient if the world's communications and cable companies wanted to provide such a service platform? Getting their act together and wanting to do it is the first step but coalescing on a common approach which would allow a seamless global, high quality service platform to be built would be second. How? By federating the underlying fragmented infrastructures and gluing them together with a set of standards that cover not just connectivity (that's the easy bit) but standards for signalling and management. It's not as if they haven't done it before – they just did it for voice calls, not today's converged services. I don't mean at the connectivity level – that's IP and that debate is over. |I mean all of the hard, enabling and management stuff that wraps around that to make a service work. Much if this technology exists but today its focus is to help service providers transform their internal operations to be slicker than before. But this is a big step beyond – we're talking about the glue between service providers that allows a global platform to exist to carry emerging content, location and advertising based services to anyone, anywhere anytime on any device.
Service Delivery Platforms are a relatively new concept. They have grown from the basic notion that to be a service provider in today's fast moving market you need to be able to build services from reusable components – assembling them as required. These are components like bandwidth, presence, location, billing, security, authentication and so on. To make that work has meant a marriage between the ‘communications up' view of life ( NGN's IMS et al) and an ‘application down' view of life ( SOA, PLM etc). I'd like to think the TM Forum has helped play cupid to that. But we are talking 2 steps beyond that position. The big realisation beyond the notion of rapid service assembly from SOA based components is that those components can be (web service) exposed to third parties to build new, novel services on top of your infrastructure and thus allow the component owner to share in some of the revenue that today goes ‘over the top' of most communications providers.
But the third step in this realisation is that if you can share exposed components with 3rd party application / service developers (i.e. the next Stanford students on their way to becoming zillionaires),why not use that capability between service providers to provide that global, seamless service platform?
Some players are seeing the light. At TM Forum we are working hard on the business and technology frameworks need to make that happen. It's complicated but it's not rocket science either. The main barrier is getting everyone on the same page and having a common vision.
Fear of a common enemy is a good catalyst for forging a common view even if the common enemy is intangible and simply the fear of being relegated to by-standing bit haulers in the emerging digital marketplace. Does that turn into a “service providers of the world against Google” strategy. No, I don't think so. As soon as Google does start acquiring bandwidth big-time or even makes a play for some communications companies, they get to be in the same boat. Everyone needs everyone else.
Especially when you can avoid wiring up the planet twice or 3 times over.