Since Ken Camp’s post calling Telco 2.0 a flawed delusion, I’ve been ruminating on his premise and his arguments surrounding them.  After resisting the first impulse to respond, I finally succumbed after reading Rich Therani’s commentary.  In particular, this is where I sort of checked out of Ken’s argument:

I find the idea of Telco 2.0 an anathema to good business sense. I know
the carriers all want to be Telco 2.0, but why? If I extend my Yucatan
event analogy a bit, the Mastodon was simply Elephant 1.0. It’s gone
and pretty much forgotten, but why on earth would you aim to become
Elephant 2.0, the pachyderm that’s shrinking in population today? To
what end? Why would you aim to become a slow, lumbering beast of burden
that’s faced with extinction on the horizon?

And I really hung my head with

… it’s time to recognize that the entire construct we call a Telco is simply not relevant to society, business or the world today. Those companies aiming to become Telco 2.0 are already doomed
because the worst thing that can happen to them is to hit the mark.
Imagine the agony of working to achieve prehistoric ignominy and defeat
at the jaws of a fierce new predator that’s smaller, faster, more
adaptable and built to evolve.

The real question I’m facing right now is how do I accurately express an emotional truth without profanity, because this is simply bullshit. I’m all for future communications (obviously), but let’s step off the moon-bat bus for a second. Let me get this straight, telecommunications, a two trillion dollar market, indisputably critical to every single civilization and citizen thereof on earth and delivered nearly exclusively by telco’s is not relevant to society, business or the world.  Sure thing. Makes sense to me.

Or perhaps the point was that the Telco’s natural tendencies towards control and closed gardens were not well suited for social media….

Five words that do not describe telecommunications or the telecom
industry – Participation, Openness, Conversation, Community and
Connectedness. The industry, the whole construct of that framework is
to control four of those by ensuring there is no community in the first
place. To embrace community is not to become Telco 2.0, but to create something entirely new.

Fine. Here’s a suggestion – why don’t we all put our money where our mouths are, and in the name of social media, do everything we can to avoid the telecom industry.  All of us in social media should promise to never use cell phones, the internet, wireless, or anything else provided to us from that evil, horrible thing called the telco. And, just in case a bit should go awry, let’s disconnect our computers from the local network, because it’s a fine line between LANs and WANs. No sense risking it. Utopia is right around the corner.  (As a side note, I’m sure that everybody reading this is at least somewhat comprimised and feels in their gut that there’s an upside to operators, because I’m using the INTERNET to publish it, effectively excluding all potential readers that feel that it’s not relevant to society, business or the world today.)

Go ahead and hate Telcos if you want. Hate them for reliable services. Hate them for the revenue they generate. Hate them for the jobs they create. Hate them all you want.  Thank god all of the really great social media communication efforts like Twitter, Facebook and Jaiku have nothing to do with those evil corporations.

Telco 2.0 refers to a new and expanded role for telcos by opening up their network resoures for developers, and in my neck of the woods, I work on Telco 2.0 by using APIs to accelerate and reduce friction in the business proceses.  Now over nearly a hundred projects, I’ve found that my customers save money, time and even lives.  Well, if the worst thing that happens to me and my Telco 2.0 customers is that we hit the mark, and realize the $750 billion dollar Telco 2.0 opportunity, I’ll just have to spend my old age trying to understand how something so irrelevant and doomed made so much a positive difference to all concerned.

Oh yeah, I hear VoIP’s dead too. Darn it, just when it looked like it was going to represent the large part of international termination minutes, we have to rip it out and go back to TDM? What a pain that’s going to be! And what about the majority of PBX seats? Aren’t they VoIP too? Man, I really hope somebody somewhere rethinks this stuff. Telcos are done. VoIP is done. Maybe the Internet is next.

I think I’ll just go home. The world’s gone crazy on me.