McGuire’s Law

It’s been a long time since I last posted. I’m also very behind in responding to comments, I apologize for that and hope to get caught up in the next few days. Between a lengthy overseas vacation and a full plate of work, it’s been hard to carve out time for this blog.

But, there are a few news items that are worth commenting on.

The first few items point to Sprint’s commitment to continuing to accelerate the Mobility Revolution. This shows up in a number of ways - Sprint has been scoring well in RootMetric’s network comparison tests demonstrating our commitment to the network investments that are necessary to support the Mobility Revolution.

According to Chitika, we’ve also been increasing our share of the Android market (see graph below). Note that Android sales from our prepaid brands (Virgin and Boost both have Android handsets that are selling well) are not included in Sprint’s numbers and probably are a meaningful part of the growth in “other”. This demonstrates our commitment to the open development environment which is key to customers integrating mobility into all aspects of their lives.

This commitment to the network and platforms necessary for the Mobility Revolution is reflected in how our customers use their devices. According to a Consumer Reports study, Sprint’s smartphone customers use about twice as much data as our competitors’ customers - proving the point that Sprint’s customers are way out ahead in the Mobility Revolution - making mobility integral to everything they do.

The final news item I can’t pass without commenting on is Google’s proposed acquisition of Motorola. This deal is a clear demonstration of the Mobility Revolution in action. Google, perhaps the most powerful company on the planet, has put their money where their mouth is. For a couple of years Google has been saying that mobility is their top priority and now they are proving it. As with any big deal, this one’s not a simple black and white, good or bad news story. I think I can best address it in terms of what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s ugly about the potential tie up.

The Good:

• Google gains Motorola’s patents, which help in the patent wars in which Big Bell Dogmatists have been trying to slow down the Mobility Revolution by impeding Android-based innovation.
• Google gains a better appreciation of the complexities OEMs face in building Android handsets, likely leading to improvements in the operating system.
• Google likely gains traction with Google TV through Motorola’s Set Top Box business, potentially bringing additional value to the Android ecosystem and encouraging some pretty interesting cross-platform innovation (imagine a Netflix or Hulu app with your smartphone as remote control and the STB as video player).
• Motorola’s strength in low-cost feature phones may provide Google with insights into how to expand the Android ecosystem into emerging markets.

The Bad:

• Motorola is obviously a strong competitor to Google’s other Android OEM partners. Samsung, LG, HTC, and others are likely to pause and consider their level of commitment to Android going forward.
• Google gains leverage in the Android and overall mobile ecosystem, making all other players work harder to earn their fair share of industry profits.
• The deal will require regulatory approval, which will take months, potentially slowing down innovation at Motorola, Google, and other ecosystem players.

The Ugly:

• Google has to convince everyone that they won’t unfairly favor Motorola over other handset OEMs.
• RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia are all in unstable positions in the mobile industry. Microsoft potentially has the opportunity to win the hearts of Motorola’s competitors, but if they fail to do so, they may find themselves with an unsustainable market position. Microsoft may also succumb to the urge to keep pace with Google by acquiring Nokia or RIM. And RIM’s only hope (other than being bought) is if enough of the ecosystem shifts from Android to Windows to keep RIM within sight of the pack.

What do you think - did I miss anything?

Today’s news is hardly surprising. I think Fierce’s Mobile’s Sue Marek describes the news better than I could:

Less than six months after AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA announced their mobile commerce initiative, called Isis, it appears that these major players are already starting to rethink their ambitious plans.

Today the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the operators are scaling back Isis, which they had originally hoped would compete with Visa and MasterCard and instead have decided to set up a mobile wallet.

Interestingly, this new mobile wallet plan sounds very similar to what Sprint Nextel has been doing. If you recall, Sprint was noticeably absent from the Isis joint venture. The operator said at the time that it was not interested in competing with the credit card companies and didn’t want to be part of a proprietary system. Instead, the company unveiled a mobile wallet solution in November that enables customers to use buy physical and digital products directly from their phones, entering a universal PIN code and billing purchases to their existing Visa, MasterCard and Amazon Payments accounts. Sprint’s Mobile Wallet is not a carrier billing mechanism, instead the company calls it a “container” for on-the-go customers to leverage traditional payment methods.

It appears that AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless are taking a cue from Sprint. The WSJ article says that Isis is in talks with Visa and MasterCard and others to see if they will participate in this mobile wallet initiative.

Here’s what I had to say about Isis back in December:

Isis is a perfect example of Big Bell Dogma. Carriers think they can do a better job than Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and others in the payments ecosystem, so they invest billions to try to replicate capabilities and compete with existing players rather than focusing on what carriers actually do well and enabling the existing players and nimble startups to leverage the carrier’s infrastructure to bring real value to consumers. Carriers have been trying to do that for over a hundred years in different industries. Sometimes they get lucky and succeed, but most of the time it’s a miserable failure.

Does this Isis abandonment point to the death of the Bell’s “Big Bell Dogma” strategies?

I hope not. As I concluded in that December post:

Maybe I shouldn’t be trying so hard to put an end to Big Bell Dogma. Instead, in the short term, Sprint can enjoy the benefits of being the best partner for everyone else in the ecosystem, and in the long term, we all can enjoy the fruits of Big Bell Dogma’s glorious failures.

So, as the Big Bells continue to compete with their customers/partners in home security and social coupons, all I have to say to everyone in the ecosystem is: if you want to move at carrier speed, go talk to the big bells and wait for them to enter your market and compete with you. If you want to move at silicon valley speed with a true partner focused on mutual success, come talk to Sprint.

Standard disclaimer: don’t take from my selections, ordering, headlines, etc. any indications of the interests or plans of my employer (if you do, you’ll undoubtedly be disappointed when they don’t play out.)

• Apple, Adobe, and Openness: Let’s Get Real
• Let’s Face Facts: Google Isn’t So Open At Times Either
• Where next for operators’ service innovation?
• An Open iPhone App Market That Doesn’t Require Jailbreaking… And Which Apple Can’t Stop
• Boris’s Bikes and Open Data
• New Carrier-App Developer Relationships Speed Up Innovation and Time to Market
• Business Case for Opening The Network
• What is definition of “Open” ?
• Sprint’s McGinnis talks Sprint ID and redefining the mobile app experience
• Sprint CEO: Internet of Things & Telco of Tomorrow

This week I participated in the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco. For the panel I was on, I wanted to find a way to sum up the role of the mobile operator in the application ecosystem.

As I’ve often said, there’s lots of ways that carriers (in their Big Bell Dogma ways) try to force themselves into (or onto) the ecosystem that just plain don’t make sense. As I said at this conference a year ago, application developers want to move at Silicon Valley speed, not carrier speed.

That doesn’t mean that mobile operators are relegated to just being dumb pipes.

Instead, we need to understand where we do, uniquely, create value for the ecosystem. To me, it boils down to Bandwidth, Bills, and Bags.

For starters, we really are network companies. We operate billions of dollars worth of network assets that enable stuff (voice signals, web pages, mobile ads for “free” games) to get from the right point A to the right point B. Clearly, it’s more than just Bandwidth, but for the benefit of alliteration (so at least I can remember it), I’ll use that word to represent this vast array of assets. Carriers can contribute significant value-creation potential into the ecosystem by exposing those assets to developers to enable tremendous innovation (location, QoS, call control, performance data, etc.).

But, we aren’t just network companies. Mobile operators have long term relationships with our customers. I’ve chosen the image of the cellphone Bill to represent a complex set of interactions that provide the carrier with perhaps the most complete view of the customer that anyone has. On one hand, those bills can be a valuable way for developers to monetize their efforts, but even more, the information that the mobile operator holds about each customer is a veritable treasure chest. We have a responsibility to be good stewards of this treasure entrusted to us (consciously or not) by our customers. On one hand, we must defend the privacy of customer data “to the death.” On the other hand, as good stewards, we must enable the maximum value creation on behalf of our customers. We must enable developers to create capabilities that our customers can choose to approve the use of their data to make applications work better (e.g. location-based search) or even enable applications that simply aren’t possible otherwise (e.g. social location services).

Finally, we not only operate networks and maintain relationships with customers, but we also are some of the largest retailers in each of our territories. We operate thousands of stores where customers can walk in and interact with us. Historically, these stores were primarily sales locations. Increasingly, especially with increasingly complex products, these stores have become service locations. And in the past couple of years Sprint has introduced “ReadyNow” services to help customers fully use those increasingly complex products. While not yet on the order of Apple’s Genius Bar, ReadyNow is a valuable way that Sprint helps customers use their smartphones to do more than just talk.

I think my message was well received by the audience. What do you think? Does Bandwidth, Bills, and Bags communicate how mobile operators (like Sprint) are more than just dumb pipes, but rather value-contributing partners in the mobile ecosystem?

Standard disclaimer: don’t take from my selections, ordering, headlines, etc. any indications of the interests or plans of my employer (if you do, you’ll undoubtedly be disappointed when they don’t play out.)

• Symbian Foundation talks about its move to open source
• Creating the unwired world
• Is fear the driving factor behind carriers’ ‘open’ claims?
• When Open Platforms Get Closed: AT&T Cripples Backflip
• A Belated New Year’s Resolution: No Walled Gardens!
• The Pressure to Be Open: How Are Network Operators Coping?
• Operator API Business Models: There’s two of them
• Open vs. Closed: In the Ongoing Battle Over Control, How Much Is Too Much?
• Open vs. Closed: What Does Open Really Mean?
• Carriers Must Open Up to Be Successful With Their Mobile App Market

Standard disclaimer: don’t take from my selections, ordering, headlines, etc. any indications of the interests or plans of my employer (if you do, you’ll undoubtedly be disappointed when they don’t play out.)

• Open Beats Closed in the App Economy
• How open is open?
• Alcatel-Lucent to Help Carriers Open Up
• Open Mobile
• Google’s Open Manifesto Tells It Like It Is
• 1st Privacy 2.0 International Summit - Telcos as ‘mediators of trust’?
• Embedded Wireless: A Step Towards Dumb Pipes?
• As Google Takes On the iPhone, True Openness — and Developers — Are Key
• The Google Phone Won’t Open Up the Wireless Industry
• Building An Open Network

My interview at the Telco 2.0 event in December (from TelecomTV):

Standard disclaimer: don’t take from my selections, ordering, headlines, etc. any indications of the interests or plans of my employer (if you do, you’ll undoubtedly be disappointed when they don’t play out.)

• Verizon Bows to the Will of the People
• AT&T to Allow VoIP Calls Over 3G Network
• The rise of open mobile (and congratulations Android team)
• Mobile WAN operators raise ‘openness’ bar
• On the the rise of open mobile
• Wireless Economics And Net Neutrality/Open Access
• Walled gardens have collapsed
• Qualcomm Creates Subsidiary for Open Source Development
• Survey: Last walled garden will wither by 2012
• Who Will Foster the Great Location API?
• FourSquare Opens API, Invites Developers to Play

Standard disclaimer: don’t take from my selections, ordering, headlines, etc. any indications of the interests or plans of my employer (if you do, you’ll undoubtedly be disappointed when they don’t play out.)

• Mobile 2012: Symbian Opens Wide
• Symbian: Evolving toward open
• Sprint says it must ‘let go’ to enable innovation
• Transcript: The Business Case for Opening the Network
• Video: The Business Case for Opening the Network
• We Open Wide, and You Say “Ahhh Haaa”
• Verizon Talks the Openness Talk, Doesn’t Walk the Openness Walk

Standard disclaimer: don’t take from my selections, ordering, headlines, etc. any indications of the interests or plans of my employer (if you do, you’ll undoubtedly be disappointed when they don’t play out.)

• Living in the KT Boundary: In a world of solving life’s little problems one app at a time; Skype on smartphones (iPhone, Nokia, Blackberry etc) could be a key differentiator for the Operator.
• Is Verizon Really Ready to Open Up Its Network?
• 3 of UK Marries Itself to Skype; Shakes Up the Mobile Market
• Smart Pipes Conference Day One
• Smart Pipes Conference Day Two
• Nokia to open Ovi Map Player platform to developers
• Will the Openness of Android Turn it Into Another Windows Mobile?
• Open APIs 2.0 - Unifying Commercial Framework Needed
• Is an open network necessary?
• Testing and getting certified on the network