I don’t know how I came to find them, but I was listening to two talks from d.Construct 2005, a grass-roots Web 2.0 (splutter, ahem) conference held in November last year.
The first one I listened to, from Cory Doctorow, made a loud ‘ker-chunk’ in my head as it meshed with a few other lines of thought I had on how to take the mobile industry into the next level of growth.
1) Cory made a great story comparing Alchemists of the Dark Ages, who toiled individually, jealously guarding their science (and all dying from drinking mercury), to scientists of the Enlightenment, where ideas were shared, a wave which we are still riding. He then labeled the protectionist contortions of Big Media as ‘Alchemists’ and those who are hacking the media as ‘Enlightenment’.
2) Cory also brought up an anecdote of John Philip Sousa wagging his finger at the government, asking it to heavily control the newly emerging sound recording systems that were threatening his sheet music business (the music publishing business back then). Imagine if he had won, there would be no recording industry (and no radio, and no TV, and no Cable, and no DVD, etc).
3) Elsewhere, Will Wright gave a great Long Now seminar with Brian Eno on Playing with Time – a lot about generative creativity. Really great. The generative music and art that Brian has been creating is usually based on simple rules that lead to rich outcomes. Will, of The Sims fame, has come out with a new game called Spore, which uses simple rules of life, ecology, and so on to create a rich game that is very very complex. The conversation went back and forth on complex and simple stuff. Fascinating, really. In short, Will said, he kept seeing places where complex rules only had finite range versus places where simple rules had an infinite range. As a biology geek, who played at the atomic, molecular, genetic, and physiological layers, I took this for granted.
4) Earlier, I heard Clayton Christensen talk about how many innovations seem to move the value to another layer. For example, open source is making software free, forcing the value to migrate to other layers, such as service (up) or technology (down).
5) A while back, when Nokia was about to come out with the N-Gage, a friend and I spent a long time thinking about what we would do if we were Nokia and were entering the gaming industry. Our take was to be a game publisher, but extract value from other layers in the ecosystem (but not the device layer, which game companies do not extract value from). It was more to help the game publishers make more money and make more games, but also a hope that Nokia could, as a newcomer, flip the game industry on its head. Eh. Didn’t happen.
6) And the last thread that’s on my mind and fits this whole thought was a comment from Will Hearst, of the Hearst dynasty. He was giving a Long Now Seminar with Chris Anderson, getting into more permutations of the Long Tail. What was great was that Chris’ stuff has been maturing and becoming less a descriptive concept and more an active predictive concept. Chris was saying how understanding the implications of the Long Tail should help one understand how to build upon it. And it was great to hear the ideas reflected off of Will, who, even though he could be considered Old Guard Media, gets it all quite in a New Guard way. Among the many great things he and Chris discussed, Will said, when you change the distribution and lower the barriers to entry, then you get an explosion of creativity (he gave some examples). Isn’t that what the long tail is now accepted to show?
Now to tie it all together.
All of these are something mobile network operators need to be thinking about. When I review my notes I see that I have been asking myself in so many different contexts, how can we help the operators. How do we give them incentives to open one layer and then move money to another layer? How to we help them loosen control of one layer to enhance the value in other layers? How do we avoid an end-run around immobile operators (pun intended) and bring them in? How do we help them build a rich ecosystem for all to grow?
They are crucial to our success and we to theirs.
My suggestion is that operators spend more time trying to find other layers to get money from (not wring more money out of the same game), and make other layers a lot more free (can you say access?); that they open themselves up a bit in an enlightened way and not be over protectionist (as in locking phones, for one) like alchemists (who kept dying from drinking mercury); that they surprise us and reinvent the industry, getting out of century-old telco protectionist, the-user-is-an-idiot, thinking; that they understand that control restricts and that easier distribution and lower barriers to entry lead to new levels of creativity; that they remove the complexity making it hard for even them to grow, and to keep things simple – in technology, in services, in pricing, in access, in everything.
<breathe!>
I’ve been coming back on my pendulum of ‘damn all network operators’ to realizing that the harder we push, the harder they dig in. There are very smart people at operators who are burdened by so much. How can we help them turn their huge ships around such that when they succeed, so do we?
Weigh in, below.
