Alltel Taken Private: That's Not the Issue

TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs' private equity unit are acquiring the fifth-largest U.S. wireless provider, Alltel Corp., for about $27.5 billion (chart by Chetan Sharma). The deal is the largest ever buyout in the telecom sector. One wonders just how far private equity firms can go before regulators become concerned. Wireless and cable companies are less likely to raise scrutiny.

But what if BCE, one of Canada's largest telephone companies, is taken private? At what point does the loss of public transparency become an issue for companies that, like it or not, are seen very much as having national interest implications. Not to mention social obligations not generally shared by cable or wireless providers. All the more reason to get a deal done now, fast, before such questions start getting asked, I suppose.

Google Steps Up Business Effort

Google and Salesforce.com are in talks about an alliance that conceivably could result in a new Web-based offering that integrates some of Google's online services such as email and instant-messaging with those of Salesforce.com, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Vauhini Vara.

Google also is launching a Google Apps Partner Edition, which will let other Internet companies build Google's online word-processing, spreadsheet and email services into their own products. Google Apps Partner Edition has both a free service and a package that includes phone support as well as additional branding and advertising options for a monthly fee.

The proposed alliance neatly illustrates a couple of overarching themes we see these days. Business information technology is changing because of robust consumer technologies built around the Web. As that happens in the enterprise market, value threatens to shift even further away from hardware, premises solutions or access and transport, and up into the "cloud."

And though it is a very odd thought for anybody who has been around enterprise IT or communications for a while, ad-supported services aimed at business users are coming. Premium and enhanced features will be sold for a fee. But lots of smaller businesses might find they can get along just fine with the ad-supported versions.

Over the top managed services providers will like that. Some infrastructure providers , ISPs, competitive local exchange carriers, resellers, cable companies, VARs or phone dealers won't like it so well.

"Classic" Isn't What it Used to Be...

Nokia is introducing what it calls a "classic" mobile phone, aimed at consumers and companies who appreciate simplicity and value for money."

"We recognize that a sizable number of people just want a mobile phone to stay in touch on their own terms," says John Barry, Nokia director. Apparently, "classic" isn't what it used to be.

The Nokia 3109 classic features email with attachments and synchronizes calendars and to-do lists with personal computers through its USB connection. The memory is expandable to 2 Gigabytes with a microSD memory card.

The Nokia 3109 classic is expected to be available in the second quarter of 2007 at an estimated retail price of EUR 140, excluding taxes and subsidies

The Nokia 3109 classic also features an integrated handsfree speaker, music player, UAB and Bluetooth connectivity plus an organizer with calendar, to-do list and notes.

"Staying in touch" now requires email, attachments, access to one's calendar, a music player and syncing with a PC, in addition to voice.

3G Shows Long Tail

In a way, global mobile experience shows the "long tail," Pareto principle or "80/20 rule" (80 percent of the results come from 20 percent of the services and features) already applies. Consider third generation (3G) networks. Every mobile operator has one, or is building one.

More than 74 percent of Japan's 97 million-plus subscribers were signed up for 3G services at the end of April, for example, so adoption of the platform isn't the issue.

But operators are still struggling to find the "killer app." Today's stock answer is "content." So far, however, no universally accepted "killer app" has emerged. Users are still mostly just using their phones to make voice calls and send text messages.

"As of now, it's difficult to pinpoint the killer service for 3G networks," said Lee Bang-hyung, Chief Operating Officer at SK Telecom Co Ltd. In fact, says Peter Erskine, the chief executive and chairman of Telefonica O2 Europe, agreed: "Text is the big standout."

That isn't to say a highly-used app won't be found. It is to point out that there will not be very many new applications nearly every user has to have. In the mass market, cable TV, mobile phones, videogame players, DVD players, iPods, TVs, PCs and phone lines are among the communications-related services and products that lie at the head of the usage curve. Almost everybody has them and uses them.

After these, usage begins to drop off pretty quickly. Fax machines and ATAs (or network interfaces) are lesser-used products that lie in the middle of the curve. PhoneGnome boxes, Jajah and mobile video today are things way out on the tail. If you randomly ask people on the street whether they use any of them, the expected answer would be "no."

In the mobile data services revenue bucket, service providers are eager to show rising average revenue per user in things other than short message service (text messaging). Those revenues are growing. From what we can tell, an awful lot of that revenue is coming from data cards and BlackBerry-driven data plans. So the growing, non-texting data revenues are for email and Web access, not content, music or other newer services.

What that tells us is that mobile email is emerging as a "head of the tail," popular service. Mobile broadband is shifting a bit closer to the middle of the curve. Some observers are hopeful that "watching TV on a mobile" will become a killer app. Perhaps. But we wouldn't be surprised if mobile email winds up being a bigger revenue driver. Or even mobile PC access, for that matter.

Our experience with 3G so far suggests the long tail operates in telecom as one would expect: Very few killer apps and lots and lots of things important to some people, some times. A few blockbusters, lots of niches, in other words.

BT Gets Monkeys Off Back

In 2001, BT had just three problems, says Sir Christopher Bland, BT Chairman. "Get the banks off our back, get the newspapers off our back, and get the politicians off our back." Bland says the monkeys are gone. To wit, the almost £30 billion debt situation has been dealt with. The issue of whether BT could grow revenues in a climate of declining traditional access lines has been answered. And while not everybody is completely reassured, BT has shown success at transforming itself from a "boring utility" to a company growing software and information technology businesses.

That isn't to say BT has succeeded wildly with all its initiatives. So far, there is little to show in the fixed-mobile convergence and personal TV areas, for example.

Where BT really has succeeded are network IT services and broadband. Over the last five years, network IT services have grown with the compound annual growth rate of almost 20 percent, at £4.4 billion, as BT's largest single stream or revenue, exceeding those of other calls or lines.

And broadband is the defining new service of the decade, having grown seven fold.

BT has grown its earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation for five consecutive quarters, with a nine-quarter improving trend.

The impressive thing is that mobility is such a slight factor. For most other tier one providers, mobility is the main story. BT has grown without mobile revenues to speak of. Certainly not on the scale of broadband and IT services. Maybe new monkeys are going to jump on. But at least the old olds are gone.

"The Network is the Computer"

Unfortunately, some of us can remember John Gage, Sun Microsystems co-founder saying this in 1984 or so. Nearly a quarter of a century later, we still haven't fully gotten there. With the rise of peer to peer technologies, many will offer we won't need to go there. Oddly enough, and for all sorts of reasons, network-centric computing is starting to look a lot like the older client-server model many thought we were morphing beyond.

Users don't care about that, of course. What they care about is how their lives change for the better. And there now is no question but that this new age of "computing architecture" is changing things. We would argue it is for the better, though the outcome is open.

We used to talk about "the network as the computer." Today, we talk about Web 2.0, which uses the networked computing platform and adds social elements (Dion Hinchcliffe produced the graphic). In some ways, "the network as the computer" will change at least some of the methods we employ to discover and retrieve video, audio and other content.

In the enterprise space, it might simply mean the ability to access centralized databases with a Web browser as the front end. At least at first. Later, more collaborative modes will develop, where end users collectively create value and knowledge of usefulness for enterprises. The analogy is Amazon and eBay, where much of the value of the service is created by users.

Still, there are clear portents. There's salesforce.com, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, all of which deliver computing resources and applications on a hosted basis.

What changes here is much more than the way we use computational resources. Networked computing changes what we can do with computational resources. And those new ways are going to serioiusly shake business models across media and communications.

Google Wants The Best Answer

"Back in 2001, Eric asked for a brainstorm of a few "splashy" ideas in search," says Marissa Mayer, Google VP. "I made a few mockups, one of which was for "universal search," she says. "It was a sample search results page for Britney Spears that, in addition to web results, also had news, images, and groups results right on the same page."

"Even then, we could see that people could easily become overwhelmed with the number of different search tools available on Google, let alone those that would be created over the next few years," Meyer says. "This proliferation of tools, while useful, has outgrown the old model of search," says Meyer. "We want to help you find the very best answer, even if you don't know where to look."

That mockup and early observations were the motivation behind the universal search effort Google expects will break down silos of information that exist on the Web. Google's vision for universal search is to ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for. Google already is incorporating information from a variety of previously separate sources – including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites – into a single set of results.

In principle, the new approach means that searches on a single key word or phrase will return unified results that might previously have required separate searches in "Web," "news," "video," "image," "people" and "maps" engines.

Google also is deploying a new technical infrastructure that will enable the search engine to handle the computationally intensive tasks required to produce universal search results and releasing the first stage of an upgraded ranking mechanism that automatically and objectively compares different types of information.

New dynamically generated navigation links have been added above the search results to suggest additional information that is relevant to a user's query. For example, a search for "python" will now generate links to Google Blog Search™, Google Book Search™, Google Groups™, and Google Code™, to let the user know there is additional information on his or her query in each of those areas.

As a result, users can find a wider array of information on their topic, including data types they might not have initially considered.

Google's homepage and a number of applications have also been updated with a new navigation bar to provide easier access to popular Google products. Now, instead of having links above the Google.com homepage search box, users will see a navigation bar on the top left side of the page with various Google search properties and popular products including Gmail™, Google Calendar™, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and Picasa Web Albums.

Google also announced a new experimental version of its popular search service called Google Experimental, available on Google Labs. This new test site provides users an opportunity to try out some of the latest search experiments and innovations and provide Google with feedback.

One of the first experiments to be featured on the site enables users to view their search results on a map or timeline. For instance, when someone searches for "Albert Einstein" on Google Experimental, they can choose to view the search results on a map that shows locations mentioned within web pages about Albert Einstein or on a timeline that illustrates the history of Albert Einstein's life.