Sprint
A friend of mine is a former Vice President at Sprint. He helped to make them the kings of long distance back in the 80s and 90s. He is very sad to see his former company in its current state. This is a company that was, at one time, on top of the world. Sprint was founded back in 1899 and has seen its share of ups and downs. Lately it’s all been pretty shabby with the company failing to absorb Nextel and hemorrhaging subscribers as a result. Their latest earnings paint a bleak future for the company unless something drastic is done. I am not a finance person, but it doesn’t take one to see this company has taken a seriously wrong turn.
My impression is that they have forgotten what kind of impact good long-term thinking can have on a company. My friend, who knew the former CEO Gary Forsee very well, says that the short-term thinkers were very much en vogue at the company. This seems to be an epidemic in the corporate world. It is a symptom of something very wrong with our capitalist economy. Sustainability and long-term growth are no longer on the radars of today’s investors. This leads to unnecessary failures of companies with good fundamental growth opportunities and stifles technological innovation needlessly.
Sprint is the company that laid much of the original fiber in the US. They owned large portions of the Internet, Wireless and private data networks in this country. Their mistake was forgetting their heritage as a company that makes good long-term investments in core technologies. The telecom market tanked in the early 2000s and Sprint went for the immediate “win” that was Nextel and the instant “growth” that it would allow. They bought a company that had such a hugely different culture, technology and values that they were destined to fail. Sprint split itself up and sold itself off in the name of short-term gains that never really existed in the first place.
Now I don’t think that the geeks will rise to take over pieces of Sprint, but the private equity firms may. Just today it became known that the Korean company SK Telecom along with Providence Equity Partners were rejected in a bid to invest $5 billion in Sprint. This is absurd. Sprint should be working with private equity firms to take the company private, lay off a layer of management, restructure the company into a technology company (much like SK Telecom has done) and reinvent itself once again as a leaader in telecom innovation. Instead the short-term panic has set in once again at Sprint and they feel the need to create immediate shareholder value (their stock is at $15 and change as I write this – down from their highs of $74 or so).
Taking the company private and fixing the company is the best way to ensure Sprint’s ultimate resurrection as a telecom leader. Once the company is private they can feel free to experiment with new business models, create new intellectual capital and innovate. There is so much potential here, so much stored up capital that it’s not even funny. I hope they don’t put it to waste in the public markets.
Innovation through Acquisition
The way I see it there has been very little innovation in technology in the past 20 years. We largely do things now the same way we have in the past. This is not to say there isn’t any, there is, but it’s less visible than I feel it should be and at a more incremental pace than I would like. To me true innovation comes from the “big hairy audacious goal” (thanks Mr. Collins) and we certainly haven’t been trying for that lately in many areas.
Much of my daily frustrations come from the fact that we are all too complacent as consumers of technology with what we have. For example: we are more than happy to sit down at our desk, fire up a window to read email, another to read news, another to write a document, etc. This stuff is fundamentally unchanged from the days of the Xerox Star in 1977. We’ve even stretched metaphors to fit new devices (see Windows Mobile, Blackberry, etc.)
And basic UI is only the starting point for what I’m talking about here. Look at my post from earlier this week and you’ll find that three of the ideas listed are based on innovating out of our current situation. These are three things that I think we should have figured out how to do many years ago. There is no technical reason not to do them. The reason things like this haven’t been done is a lack of organizational hubris, vision and political will. No company wants to take on the task of building such things because there is zero immediate positive impact on their bottom lines.
I think it’s time for a company to come up with a BHAG of actually doing these things, and more. The only way to demonstrate a new way of doing something is to actually do it, and that means wresting control of the basic infrastructure from entrenched interests. We have come to a point in the evolution of our economy where one must Acquire to Innovate.
Large media conglomerates will never willingly change their business models to support new user interactions for Televisions. Large telecom companies will never willingly change their business models to support new user interactions for Telephones. They simply can’t.
But we can.
Demonstrations of new interaction models can be done at a small scale by purchasing cable, wireless and telephone companies’ interests in one local market. A company that can focus on building one system the right way, with no distractions or needs for immediate profit. It’s a long bet in a short term world. Build something that people actually love to use, and they will pay you back in spades.
ROI calculations are for people who are risk averse and uninterested in true innovation. ARPU is irrelevant. The era of scarcity is over. Move over big boys it’s time for the geeks to come in.
Ideas: 26 November, 2007
These aren’t all new. Just a start at weekly brainstorming. Not going to have 30 minutes today…work gets in the way.
- Capture energy on the roofs of buildings with solar, wind, etc. using low-cost, high output generation techniques.
- Automate capacity plans for servers such that deployment can be done on an autonomic basis. Servers know when they are out of capacity, let them use that knowledge to cause another machine or virtual to come online automatically.
- Phone numbers are obsolete. Let’s stop exposing the inner workings of the phone system to people. Let me call by name/location, etc.
- Television channels are obsolete. Let’s stop exposing the inner workings of the television system to people. Let me watch what I want, when I want and stream me stuff that’s interesting the rest of the time. Let the “channels” become what they really are, brands that are associated with certain productions and types of programming.
Ideation Rationalization
My pal Rich Gibson came up to Redmond for the Thanksgiving holiday and over lunch we had an idea (big surprise to those that know us). We both have tons of ideas that we have no intention of acting upon. This isn’t in and of itself something unusual; people have ideas all the time. The problem is that it’s very difficult for “normal” people to effectively broadcast and incubate their ideas so that those who can our would act upon them can get a good sense of what they were thinking. We asked some good questions:
- How do you capture ideas and let them grow?
- What’s the best way to know if any given idea is good and useful?
- Does linking ideas in either loose or strict ontologies aid in a community’s classification of them?
- What are good processes and techniques that can be used to aid a community in ideation?
It turns out that we were trying to figure out a good way of capitalizing on the emergent properties of lists of ideas. If we provided a structured process of ideation and categorization of those ideas then maybe we can give away much of what is currently living in our heads. If we separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were, then we might actually be able to get to the things that we actually want to do.
So here’s the system as I see it:
- Any active user can submit or contribute to an idea. Each idea and user gets a score based on volatility, amount linked and other factors. The scores are used to create implicit, hard to game reputations and feed future simulations (Monte Carlo, etc).
- Brainstorm ideas in one or two sentences.
- New ideas are presented to users for categorization and matching. We would need to determine the usefulness of various ontologies (tags, formal, etc) to find out what works best.
- Ideas are presented to users for expansion. As users submit more, things can be periodically rolled up into a more formal specification.
- If ideas stay at a low enough score for long enough then they will be archived.
- If a community forms around a particular idea, the leaders of that community can create a separate blog and workspace to continue to build on it.
This is a loose write-up of the idea we had. I’m not at all sure if such a system already exists or not. But it should be built and worked on. I would love to hear what people think.
leave a comment