Saturday, March 21, 2009
Here We Go Again
After a long, long delay, I'll be resuming work on MobilityWais. Stay tuned for new interviews and commentary.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Interview with Russ McGuire, Vice President of Strategy, Sprint Nextel
1. As a leader in exploring new business opportunities including being the first to offer online shopping and full-length OTA movie downloads, what do you believe have been some of the advantages and disadvantages for Sprint of being an early mover in these areas?
If you look back at the past two technology revolutions, the big winners at the end of the day are typically the companies that envision how the world is changing and then exhibit product and technology leadership in key areas. In the PC era, clearly the big winners were Microsoft and Intel. In the Internet era, big winners include Cisco and Google. Therefore, I'm confident that Sprint Nextel's strong heritage of product and technology leadership combined with our vision for how mobility is revolutionizing how we work, live, and play will position us very well from a long view perspective.However, our leadership also serves us very well in the short term. Our leadership in data, in push-to-talk, in location based services, and in mobile business solutions have translated into marketshare leadership in the segments that are leading the revolution. This leadership has also translated into healthy revenues per customer and a business that is enjoying high growth and generating the cash to invest in making this future vision a reality. All of that is good.But that doesn't mean it's easy being a leader. We have typically had products in market ahead of demand. And believe it or not, some folks still don't recognize mobility as the third technology revolution. So, at times, folks criticize our decisions and at times the demand for our leading edge offers doesn't develop as quickly as we'd like. But those times are easy to weather within the overall picture.
2. How do you see the Sprint's data services offerings developing throughout the next three to five years?
There are two major initiatives that we have underway around wireless data. One is the continuing evolution of our CDMA-based platform. This year we are completing our upgrade of our EV-DO network to the Revision A standard which, most importantly, increases the uplink speed of our industry leading broadband service. We are confident in these technologies being well positioned for delivering mobile broadband for our traditional handset portfolio.However, the more dramatic initiative we have underway is the launch of a nationwide WiMax footprint. We have announced that we will have WiMax networks operational in two cities by the end of this year (2007) expanding to a footprint covering 100 million POPs by the end of 2008. Our WiMax build is exciting on a number of fronts. For starters, the chipset costs will be dramatically lower than for previous wireless wide area network technologies. This will enable WiMax to be embedded into a broad array of products. Second, the operational costs per Megabit are dramatically lower than for previous technologies, enabling new business models and likely dramatically increasing adoption of mobile broadband. Finally, the performance characteristics of WiMax are very attractive for a broader array of applications than we've traditionally seen with wireless data.
3. You state on your blog, "the Mobility revolution will be defined by contextual relevance." What do you see as the role of the carrier in ultimately-whether it be directly or indirectly-providing this aspect of the experience to users?
There are aspects of "context" that likely will be best served by intelligence at the edge of the network - for example, correlating an incoming call with information from the address book on your phone. There are other aspects of "context" that likely will be better served by a more centralized service provider that has visibility across more of the environment than just what is visible to one user.Some of these opportunities can be served by non-telecom service providers (for example, navigation companies are well served to integrate real-time traffic information into their navigation offers).Many opportunities will benefit from wireless carrier participation. A great example is Sprint's Family Locator service which leverages the contractual relationship that we maintain that associates a family with a collection of different handsets, location information that resides within our network, and our ability to integrate the pieces so it's as painless of a service to implement and use as possible.
4. Where do you see the most opportunity for growth in the next three to five years within the mobile ecosystem taking into consideration the migration of voice from POTS to VoIP, the nascent mobile advertising revenue model, the growth in popularity of off-portal content and the rapidly evolving handset industry?
At the beginning of 1995, I quit my job with a large carrier to form an Internet startup with a couple of my friends. Our business plan included projections for Internet growth that, at the time, many thought were overly aggressive. In general, folks thought I was crazy. (Many still do, but that's another story...)In retrospect, we were dead wrong. Our growth projections were way too conservative, but more meaningful to your question, our guesses of where the growth would happen were also wrong. The areas we projected grew more than we expected, but we were blind to many of the even bigger opportunities that emerged.All that to say, these are revolutionary times and any guesses I'd give you would undoubtedly be wrong. However, I do believe that mobile data underlies virtually all of the opportunities, so data growth is a no-brainer. Folks who figure out how to create value for customers in a way that knocks down adoption barriers will do well. Value will come if you help businesses sell more and/or reduce costs. Value will come if you help consumers do more of what they enjoy at a lower cost (cost in time, money, inconvenience, etc.). Things like mobile payments are an enabler to these opportunities, and mobile advertising is simply one business model for monetizing the value creation. I wouldn't be surprised to see tremendous growth in those areas, but there undoubtedly are innovative new ideas that will seem obvious to us five years from now, but today we can't even guess...
If you look back at the past two technology revolutions, the big winners at the end of the day are typically the companies that envision how the world is changing and then exhibit product and technology leadership in key areas. In the PC era, clearly the big winners were Microsoft and Intel. In the Internet era, big winners include Cisco and Google. Therefore, I'm confident that Sprint Nextel's strong heritage of product and technology leadership combined with our vision for how mobility is revolutionizing how we work, live, and play will position us very well from a long view perspective.However, our leadership also serves us very well in the short term. Our leadership in data, in push-to-talk, in location based services, and in mobile business solutions have translated into marketshare leadership in the segments that are leading the revolution. This leadership has also translated into healthy revenues per customer and a business that is enjoying high growth and generating the cash to invest in making this future vision a reality. All of that is good.But that doesn't mean it's easy being a leader. We have typically had products in market ahead of demand. And believe it or not, some folks still don't recognize mobility as the third technology revolution. So, at times, folks criticize our decisions and at times the demand for our leading edge offers doesn't develop as quickly as we'd like. But those times are easy to weather within the overall picture.
2. How do you see the Sprint's data services offerings developing throughout the next three to five years?
There are two major initiatives that we have underway around wireless data. One is the continuing evolution of our CDMA-based platform. This year we are completing our upgrade of our EV-DO network to the Revision A standard which, most importantly, increases the uplink speed of our industry leading broadband service. We are confident in these technologies being well positioned for delivering mobile broadband for our traditional handset portfolio.However, the more dramatic initiative we have underway is the launch of a nationwide WiMax footprint. We have announced that we will have WiMax networks operational in two cities by the end of this year (2007) expanding to a footprint covering 100 million POPs by the end of 2008. Our WiMax build is exciting on a number of fronts. For starters, the chipset costs will be dramatically lower than for previous wireless wide area network technologies. This will enable WiMax to be embedded into a broad array of products. Second, the operational costs per Megabit are dramatically lower than for previous technologies, enabling new business models and likely dramatically increasing adoption of mobile broadband. Finally, the performance characteristics of WiMax are very attractive for a broader array of applications than we've traditionally seen with wireless data.
3. You state on your blog, "the Mobility revolution will be defined by contextual relevance." What do you see as the role of the carrier in ultimately-whether it be directly or indirectly-providing this aspect of the experience to users?
There are aspects of "context" that likely will be best served by intelligence at the edge of the network - for example, correlating an incoming call with information from the address book on your phone. There are other aspects of "context" that likely will be better served by a more centralized service provider that has visibility across more of the environment than just what is visible to one user.Some of these opportunities can be served by non-telecom service providers (for example, navigation companies are well served to integrate real-time traffic information into their navigation offers).Many opportunities will benefit from wireless carrier participation. A great example is Sprint's Family Locator service which leverages the contractual relationship that we maintain that associates a family with a collection of different handsets, location information that resides within our network, and our ability to integrate the pieces so it's as painless of a service to implement and use as possible.
4. Where do you see the most opportunity for growth in the next three to five years within the mobile ecosystem taking into consideration the migration of voice from POTS to VoIP, the nascent mobile advertising revenue model, the growth in popularity of off-portal content and the rapidly evolving handset industry?
At the beginning of 1995, I quit my job with a large carrier to form an Internet startup with a couple of my friends. Our business plan included projections for Internet growth that, at the time, many thought were overly aggressive. In general, folks thought I was crazy. (Many still do, but that's another story...)In retrospect, we were dead wrong. Our growth projections were way too conservative, but more meaningful to your question, our guesses of where the growth would happen were also wrong. The areas we projected grew more than we expected, but we were blind to many of the even bigger opportunities that emerged.All that to say, these are revolutionary times and any guesses I'd give you would undoubtedly be wrong. However, I do believe that mobile data underlies virtually all of the opportunities, so data growth is a no-brainer. Folks who figure out how to create value for customers in a way that knocks down adoption barriers will do well. Value will come if you help businesses sell more and/or reduce costs. Value will come if you help consumers do more of what they enjoy at a lower cost (cost in time, money, inconvenience, etc.). Things like mobile payments are an enabler to these opportunities, and mobile advertising is simply one business model for monetizing the value creation. I wouldn't be surprised to see tremendous growth in those areas, but there undoubtedly are innovative new ideas that will seem obvious to us five years from now, but today we can't even guess...
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Making Mobile Happen
I'm the founder and CEO of a mobile startup which, beyond adventurous, makes make kind of crazy. Mobile is tough. But don't get me wrong, it'll be bigger than any technology we've seen yet. Don't take it from me. Early last year Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was quoted as saying, "Mobile will be a larger business than the PC-Web." The question is how do we transition the business, technology and user behavior we have today into a future of mobile computing? That's the purpose of this blog. To help answer this question I'll feature commentary, links and most importanlty interviews with leaders in the field.
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