Being right is the easy part

Hey kids, pull up a beanbag and let me tell you about the information superhighway.

Better still, take a look at these old AT&T ads:

Way back then, before the iPhone, before YouTube and Tumblr, before blogs and even before Rickrolling, Al Gore used to irritate excite people with tales of the information superhighway.

As it didn’t exist, AT&T kindly invented it in this series of ads. Thanks to Benoît Felten’s Fibrevolution blog for pointing me towards these (in turn his memory was jogged by Douglas Coupland.)

I recall them from my time in the then spanking-new Telstra Multimedia subsidiary. We loved the IS but weren’t really sure what our role would be apart from building it, or of how profitable it would be (ha!).

We used the AT&T ads to stimulate discussion and educate our staff as we worked up our own vision, and eventually execution of the wired future.

But as Benoît says:

What's really interesting to me is that if you project back, it took a fair bit of vision to actually anticipate some of these changes, and if you look closely, every single one of them came true. What's even more interesting to me is that AT&T (or more generally telcos) have virtually no stake in any of those. I've compiled a table to look at who is the key player for each of these. 

True on both counts: a brilliant piece of future-telling, and yet telcos still missed the boat.

Why that's so is a long tale, but essentially it's because of the complexity of telcos, and the fact that skills and culture that go with managing and marketing networked services aren't necessarily going to build succesful shopping apps.

Since then telcos have allowed themselves to be disrupted by successive and foreseeable waves of competition and new technology.

Right now the OTT tsunami threatens, especialy for cellcos. To survive and prosper they have to do work on the things they don't do well: partnering, revenue sharing, non-price differentiation, and quick setup and teardown of services. All those things they're reluctant to do because they involve different behaviours and skillsets and threaten their control.

If not - well, there'll be plenty of time to enjoy those clever AT&T vids.