Exactly two years ago, I resigned my position as a CTO of a business unit of Comverse to study what I believed was the next big thing in communications: using the web as a platform for applications.   I remember that day pretty clearly, as it was my fortieth birthday.   My friend and I both turned forty within days of each other, and our wives threw us a surprise party.   All of our friends crowded into the VFW hall across from the Hyannis Airport, downed glasses and toasted our old age and my lack of employment.  I was sure that I was making an important career choice, and was betting hard that the web technologies and business model approaches were fundamentally changing our business, and even though it was scary to quit a job without prospects of another – it was even scarier to watch that bus leave from the sidewalk.   In these two years, I’ve been so lucky to work with some of the best companies and teams who share that vision… and a couple that didn’t.  Now, two years later, I’m holding a ticket for the next bus…  but, I’ll leave tomorrow’s news for tomorrow – there’s work to do today.

As I’ve prepared for my next trip, I’ve found it useful to look back on the past two years. There’s been so much I’ve learned:

• The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet : William Gibson was absolutely right.  As I’ve tromped from Enterprise software groups to carriers, and from open source Gurus to venture capital conference rooms, I can tell you with certainty that the technology market is far from efficient. There are massive amounts of knowledge percolating in silos, never to be touched by anyone more than one step away from it.  Perhaps it’s a statement about how bandwidth limited individuals are, or how much integration costs (both monetary and spiritual) delay the wide spread adoption of great technology.  I didn’t realize that a modern version of the spice trade could still be profitable.
• Physics still applies: Early on in my quest, it was apparent that business models weren’t the strong suit in the web world.  I used to tell a joke that there was exactly one business model in the web world, and it went something like “Get a lot of subscribers, however you can, then sell them to somebody so that they can figure out how to advertise to them”.  I could tell a similar story about traditional carriers: “Get some expensive asset like spectrum, handsets or switches, provide a service and lock a subscriber into a contract and do that a hundred million times. Repeat.” In both cases, physics has eventually dominated. Not every web application can be subsidized through advertising, and money doesn’t grow on trees.  As the carriers are facing an all IP world, where assets are inexpensive (creating competition) and lock-in more and more difficult (because of competition) they can’t charge what they used to.  We really don’t live in a world where a coyote can run off a cliff and hang in the air forever.  Luckily for me, CEBP and physics have no arguments.
• Doing is easy: As I suspected from the start, open source efforts, cheap bandwidth and CPUs and cloud computing offerings make “doing” very easy.  It’s now nearly trivial to provide a service – although still not trivial to provide at serious scale – and it’s getting worse.  If you want any sort of evidence, just visit Twilio… then visit Sillyio.
• Knowing is hard to replicate: The enduring value of Facebook isn’t the application itself, it’s the data it holds about the people that use it.  This data is not going to get up and walk across the road anytime soon, and since it’s valuable, it can be monetized.  Social networking isn’t magic in-and-of-itself… the data it collects is valuable and hard to replicate. As time goes on, this might be the singular addition of Web 2.0 principles to the world of business.
• To the man with a hammer: In the past two years, nearly all the entrants in the phone mashup competitions come from phone engineers… solving phone problems. It reminds me of a recent fight in Karate class when Jessica dove into Adam, driving off her back foot and landing her other foot right in front of him.  Her back hand was driving straight for his stomach – which might be an issue not only because she’s really fast, but because Adam’s six pack is sitting underneath a keg.  But, before the front foot landed, Adam swept it out, causing Jessica to put all her weight onto a foot that was no longer attached to the floor… and causing her to crash to the ground. It was a very Judo thing Adam did, which is why Jessica landed on her face. Jess was playing Karate. Adam? Not so much.  Is bringing Judo to a Karate match unfair? Maybe, and it seems to me that anyone who brings voice to a <fill in the blank match> will have an unfair advantage, just like Adam.  From my viewpoint, our industry is like a whole lot of Karate guys doing a lot of Karate.  Beware the guy with the thick uniform – he might be good with his feet.

So, what’s next? Well, I announce next week at the eComm show, so I won’t spill the beans yet.  But I will say that my past two years studying the Voice Mashups, CEBP and Web as Platform opportunity leaves me with a singular, poker inspired thought : I’m all in.