Broadside:
Mea Culpas Galore
from the June 18, 2001 issue of Broadband Week
What was one of the clearest messages to come out of broadband's most prominent gatherings, SUPERCOMM and Cable 2001? That being in the business today means never having to say you're sorry.
There were more guiltless mea culpas flying around these two shows than there are women who've been hit on by Russell Crowe.
If the discussion topic was about the lengthy list of dead CLECs and DLECs? Well, accepting the blame were venture capitalists and investment bankers that promised upstart companies all the financial crack they wanted for breakneck expansion and then cut off their supply. "We told these companies, 'Go big or go home,'" Howard Anderson, a founder of the Yankee Group and now a VC, joked at the SUPERCOMM roundtable sponsored by net.com. "The fools, they believed us."
And let's not forget the cable guys. After struggling for two years since announcing a grand interactive TV vision that it would create with financial and technology partner Microsoft, AT&T finally bagged the idea that it should put a fat client in everyone's living room just so they could surf the Web from their TV. "The thing people seem to enjoy is fuller expressions of entertainment, rather than bringing Web sites to TV," AT&T honcho C. Michael Armstrong told the Cable 2001 crowd. Anyone who's followed WebTV could have told him that years ago.
But you know what was missing in all this? The flat out admission from key people who are instrumental in guiding the growth of these industries that: A. They've wasted a lot of time and money over the past couple of years, and, B. They've learned how to keep it from happening too much again.
While it has become fashionable to take the blame for some of the history that has led to shakeouts in various industry sectors--we encouraged bad business plans via profligate financing, we let technology rather than customers dictate service offering strategies, etc., etc.--the guilty always seem to stop short of saying what they're going to do this time to make things right.
The good news is that the ups and downs of the past two years seem to have created a better awareness among some that it's better to have a jaundiced eye early in a trend than to be apologetic about the disasters that sometimes follow.
At SUPERCOMM, Christine Heckart, president of the consulting firm Telechoice, was describing as "pure baloney" the perception that the optical metro networks business was a bottomless gold mine. "How many metro companies are out there, 3,000?" she said in response to a question at the net.com roundtable. "We can support maybe three. Yeah, the metro needs to be built out, but in many cases it already has been. It's a finite opportunity that everybody's approached as infinite. That's the flaw."
And being aware of that is nothing to be sorry about.
Afterthought: An impromptu poll at SUPERCOMM by Web careers site TelecomCareers.net found 79 percent of the 511 people surveyed didn't know the Tauzin-Dingell bill to deregulate the RBOCs is being debated in Congress. Conversely, that means about two in 10 people did know. Who says Americans are apathetic about their government?
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