José Ribamar Smolka Ramos
Telecomunicações
Artigos e Mensagens
WirelessBrasil
Fevereiro 2012 Índice Geral
27/02/12
• Como mudar o DNA das operadoras de
telecom
de J. R. Smolka smolka@terra.com.br
por yahoogrupos.com.br
para "wirelessbr@yahoogrupos.com.br" <wirelessbr@yahoogrupos.com.br>,
"Celld-group@yahoogrupos.com.br" <Celld-group@yahoogrupos.com.br>
data 27 de fevereiro de 2012 17:26
assunto [wireless.br] Como mudar o DNA das operadoras de
telecom
Oi pessoal,
Através do serviço de notícias do LinkedIn cheguei
nesta matéria, publicada no dia 20/02/2012 no Pando Daily.
O que achei mais interessante é que eu venho falando há muito tempo sobre o
problema da dificuldade em inovar dentro do ambiente técnico das operadoras de
telecom. Esta matéria mostra que este problema é muito mais profundo, e vem
acontecendo a muito tempo.
O que me leva, de novo, à questão: se queremos provocar uma mudança no DNA
antiinovação das operadoras de Telecom, qual o melhor caminho? Dar porrada pela
via regulatória e legal, na esperança que eles percebam o erro e mudem? Ou
encontrar alguma forma de promover o espírito inovador latente (e certamente
existente) lá dentro, através de alguma agenda positiva, que torne mais
interessante aderir à inovação que aferrar-se à ortodoxia?
Eu, sinceramente, prefiro buscar este último caminho. Não é fácil, e exige uma
completa reformulação dos princípios que foram "congelados" como fundamentais
para o negócio. Por isso ando interessado em coisas como
Theory of Constraints,
Throughput Accounting e
Radical Management, além de
Agile Software Development e
Scrum.
Como diz o Hélio Rosa, é preferível ler na fonte.
[ ]'s
J. R.
Smolka
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The Carriers Are Stuck In The Innovator’s Dilemma. Just Don’t Tell Them That.
By Jeff Lawson
On February 20, 2012
Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, who wrote the book “The Innovator’s
Dilemma” that defined such corporate conundrums, described them as arising when
a disruptive technology—like a small disk drive or steel mill—becomes so big
that it displaces an existing market, sending big, successful businesses to
their doom.
Of course, this happens in part because disruptive technologies are often
difficult to recognize. This is especially true in the case of telecom, when the
disruptive innovation isn’t any particular technology per se, but the rise of
smart devices at the edge of carrier networks.
Carriers have embraced this trend, believing that iPhones, iPads, Droids and
other smart devices will eventually reduce customer churn and increase the
amount of time they spend on the network.
It’s a reasonable approach—but it is contributing to a dramatic shift in the
balance of telecom power in the United States. This is particularly obvious in
the wake of the holiday season. App makers and device manufacturers like Apple
are enjoying blockbuster sales, while carriers are struggling with declining
margins and rising capital costs.
In order to profit from the boom, the carriers need to open up their networks to
innovation. The challenge is that doing so goes counter to a century of business
success—the innovator’s dilemma in action.
For the last one hundred years, telecom has been like a closed black box.
Connecting to network resources required esoteric technical knowledge and the
ability to cope with an environment that was hostile to rapid business
development. Deals were slow to take shape and often seemed to move ahead at
whim of the carrier.
But it wasn’t always this way. At the end of the last century, the newborn
American telecom industry was celebrating a party of innovation. Across the
country, a do-it-yourself networking movement was inspiring farmers and small
businessmen to string their own wires, challenging the dominance of Bell
Telephone. “Build your own lines by all means in some way,” the Rural New Yorker
exhorted.
By 1906, independent telephone companies had connected 3 million phones,
compared to Bell Telephones 2.5 million. An industrial battle involving
everything from bribery and sabotage to predatory pricing and coercive
connection agreements was in full swing.
In 1913, Bell Telephone, now renamed AT&T, responded to a federal antitrust suit,
brought on behalf of the independents, with an offer, known as the Kingsbury
Commitment, that would end up reshaping the young industry into a protected
monopoly that would persist for the next half century.
Citing the need to safeguard the network, AT&T fiercely scrutinized all
interconnections with its network. All devices had to be made by Western
Electric, its wholly owned subsidiary. Businesses that transgressed got sued, no
matter how small or unprofitable.
While regulators finally forced AT&T to open its network in 1968, the qualities
that would characterize AT&T and other carriers for the next three decades had
already been set. The networks, in practice, would be closed and the devices at
their edges would be dumb.
For the next forty years, telecom regulators repeatedly tried and failed to open
up the industry to innovation. Decades of antitrust legal activity led to the
1984 Divestiture of AT&T, which was followed by the Telecommunications Act of
1996, a major overhaul of the Communications Act of 1935 so great it inspired
more than one business chronicler to foretell the death of AT&T.
But AT&T proved resilient—and so did the black box. In 2001, Consumers Union,
the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, concluded that the 1996 act, had
failed to create meaningful competition and was a “consumer disaster.”
Then along came Steve Jobs and the iPhone. Jobs not only put a extremely smart
device at the edge of the network, he made it a platform for app development.
More than 500,000 creative minds responded with new business ideas.
Jobs wasn’t breaking new ground—he was simply remaking the classic technology
drama that pits the intelligent network against the intelligent edge. This is
just what we saw in the struggle between the mainframe and the PC, the PC and
the Internet, and the Internet and peer-to-peer networks.
Shakespearean these dramas may not be, but each of these contests has put
billions of dollars into play, and this new face off between the closed network
and the smart device is no different.
To survive the innovator’s dilemma, carriers need to increase the intelligence
of their networks and open them up for innovation.
If Twilio’s experience is any guide, there are hundreds of thousands of apps
waiting to be written on top of an open telecom network. Twilio provides a
platform for voice, VoIP, and SMS apps, adding value to existing carrier
networks.
During the past four years, developers have built everything from playful
musical hotlines, like the Callin’ Oates app that went viral over Christmas, to
SMS apps that remind patients to take their medicine and help commuters track
the progress of their local bus.
On the corporate side, virtual PBXes are replacing on-premise PBXes and
technologies like interactive voice response systems are increasingly moving to
the cloud. It turns out there are easier and cheaper ways to do everything from
call tracking to click-to-call, voice broadcasting and ID verification.
There is, in fact, a party of innovation among developers of voice, VoIP and SMS
apps that is similar in spirit to the early days of DIY telephone networks. It’s
time for the carriers to join in.
Jeff Lawson is CEO of
Twilio.