By Thomas Howe
The recent demise of Jangl is an excellent sign for the
overall health of the Telco 2.0 marketplace, and although difficult for their
investors and employees, portends great things for this market. My
sincere wish is that Telco 2.0 failures become more commonplace and numerous,
and I firmly believe it will be so. As stakeholders in this market, we
need to expect and encourage such failures. Congratulations to those
involved, and I mean that sincerely and with no animosity whatsoever.
Not too long ago, new telecom services and applications were costly to develop
and deploy, with only a chance of success in the end. Even for those that
succeeded, competitors typically replicate the service in short order, gutting
profits. The logical conclusion of many managers is to be cautious with
new service deployments, and to concentrate on maximizing existing services,
stifling innovation. They are afraid to fail, because failure costs
money. However, something's changed.
What's changed is that costs of service deployments are falling at an
increasing rate. The Internet provides a near frictionless marketplace for both
service delivery and sales, and the challenge is no longer the design and
development. The trick is now fundamental marketing: what do people want?
How do I price this? What is the fundamental problem I can solve? Surely
this is no small task, as these questions are notoriously difficult to answer
and are as often discovered through dumb luck as solved through excellent analysis.
There's no way the existing telecom infrastructure could support the
development of a million applications, with the hope that ten thousand will be
successful. However, a Telco 2.0 infrastructure can and will.
Telco 2.0 applications are built using web technologies to overlay
functionality on the existing PSTN infrastructure. Since the PSTN
infrastructure exists, there's no reason for the Telco 2.0 engineer to build
the capacity for switching calls around the network. Since Telco 2.0 applications
are delivered through the browser, there's no large workforce to manage and
train. Since there's no natural geographic barriers, the entire world
becomes your serviceable market. Since web technologies are naturally
scalable, and are paid on a transaction transaction basis, large capital
investments are unnecessary. As a result, it's radically simpler and cheaper to
write and deploy them as compared to traditional services.
The result is that we'll see many more Telco 2.0 applications than we've ever
seen from any other telecom market. Ever. Nearly all of them will fail, as
most of the people developing them will not have the marketing skills to have
any real chance of success. They tell authors that about one in a
thousand books are actually published, and the number of authors that have
published more than one book is smaller still. As you enter your local
Barnes and Noble, start counting the books, and realize each represents a
thousand others you'll never read. However, without mechanisms that allow
people to write books simply and cheaply, how many of the books that fill the
shelves would have been written in the first place? I say not many.
Congratulations to all those authors of software and prose who remain
anonymous. Congratulations to my brothers and sisters at Jangl. Even though
success was not personal for them, in very real and important ways, they
guaranteed the success of their markets.
Thomas Howe is a long-time telecom consultant, writer, and speaker who is the CEO of the Thomas Howe Company, providing expertise in improving the business process with real-time communications. His website is at http://www.thomashowe.com [1]
Links:
[1] http://www.thomashowe.com/