Announcement

Neither telecoms, nor computing: people

When the (in-?) famous “Does IT matter?” Harvard Business Review article and later book came out, many comments were intoning “I told you! I was right: IT doesn’t matter…”, without realizing that the point of the author wasn’t that of demonstrating that investments in information technology didn’t provide value to the enterprise. The fact is that this value is unsustainable in the long term (or even in the short term), if what is being done gets quickly replicated by the competitors in the industry. You have to create natural barriers where you won’t be driven to extinction by the relentless competitive pressure of providing your products or services at an ever-lower price point.

We are seeing an enormous shift in what used to be called the Telecommunications Industry, which relied on the cash-cows of voice calls, and the huge, one-off surprise gift of SMS text messages sold at their weight in gold (yes, the messages weigh little, but there are billions of them, and they still add up, to billions!). There is no guarantee, and many realize this, that the economic value being destroyed by the changes in the traditional branches of telecoms is going to be replaced by an equivalent or greater line of revenue coming from elsewhere. The Economist dedicated a cover to this in 2005 already in its article entitled “How The Internet Killed The Phone Industry” (subs req).

What can be done? We don’t have a magic bullet, but we have a few leads that we think point towards a solution, and one of them is “people”. As we build smarter and smarter networks of machines, which become more and more autonomous, and self-reliant, the final value, and long term sustainability is going to be found in those software and hardware systems which create, develop, and manage people, and how social groups form, using new tools, in an open, interactive, and dynamic manner.