Parting is such sweet sorrow

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time for every purpose, under Heaven

(Words adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes; music by Pete Seeger)

In the winter of 1994, I had just started my consulting career after years with a big industry analyst firm. Telephony’s publisher and editor approached me about becoming the first outside featured columnist to write about something other than outside plant, central office features, which wasp repellant works best, etc. “We need a monthly thought piece about industry issues and marketing challenges,” they said.  Their goal was to stimulate industry debate through a combination of insight and humor, and I was offered carte blanche. “We just want you to be you,” they said. Needless to say, I accepted without reservation. 

In January of 1995, this column made its auspicious debut. I wrote a piece on why voice communications was likely to be free in the next few years. I thought advertiser-sponsored calls--e.g., sing the Mickey Mouse Club song and get 10 minutes of free long distance--coupled with accelerating technological change would bring the costs of common carriage down to almost free and set loose a variety of calling options from a myriad of channels as a result. 

I got two things out of that first column: 

• At least I was right on the technology--encouraging, since being right about technology is considered a good thing if one is an analyst.

• A lot of e-mail, much of it very long critiques of why I could not be more wrong about everything. 

Telephony told me I was a hit. The other thing I got was the chance to have this space ever since.

All of this is a long way of saying that this will be my last column. Within the next week two weeks, I will assume a marketing communications position with a very prominent vendor in the telecommunications industry. (Send me an e-mail and I will put you on my contact list when I start.)  

Since this is my last column, I’d like to take this opportunity to express my incredible gratitude to Telephony. Not only was the content of 115 columns never altered (much to my amazement), but they also stuck by me when irritated readers clamored for apologies or worse. This has been a wonderful relationship. 

I’d also like to briefly relate why after 28 years as a trade association director of research, industry lobbyist, industry analyst and, for the last 10 years, independent business strategy and marketing consultant, I decided to turn the career page.  

The obvious motivation for me to leave consulting in favor of working more intimately in the community is that my new employer made me an offer I could not refuse. However, the reasons I could not refuse were not solely financial and personal. In fact, in no small measure, I accepted the offer based on my absolute belief that we are about to embark on a 12 to 24 month period of communications industry turmoil which I believe will rival (if not surpass) in scale, scope and long-term impact the breakup of AT&T in 1984. Our industry--every part of the value chain in every part of the globe--is about to be fundamentally restructured. 

Here is a brief list of what is on the way.

• All of the hackneyed buzz words will come to life. “Paradigms will shift” as “disruptive technologies” create and destroy markets faster than many market players can stand (or stand in the way of).

• Business models will be shed in favor of radically different approaches.

• Familiar brands will be extinguished.

• New players from adjacent markets with sharp elbows and deep pockets are going to make their presences known.

• Public policy makers will actually have to make public policies.

You may find all of this fluidity and uncertainty unnerving. To me, this is great news for the industry. With chaos comes opportunity. We have been in danger of suffering a fatal heart attack caused literally by a hardening of the arteries.   

To the intelligent and courageous will go the spoils. The analyst in me knows from looking at the numbers that the rewards will be substantial. The post-tele.bomb period is already finding solid footing. The world is becoming more network-centric every day. That is a reality today and a long-term trend. The challenge arises because economic Darwinism dictates that the list of successes and successors will be pared considerably.   

Because demand is there, supply-side economics needs to be radically altered in recognition of the new era where customers’ rules are superior to all others. As I have written many times here, accommodating the realities of the new power relationships between vendors and customers in an emerging “customer rules” environment is the biggest challenge vendors must overcome to be successful.  Denial is a chief reason why business models remain  broken. It will be very interesting to see who makes the “customer rules” trend their “friend.”

After years as an advisor, I’ve been offered an intensely hands-on opportunity to lend my skills to a company I believe will not just survive, but prosper. After years of kibitzing, an opportunity to have skin in the game--how could I refuse such a chance?   

To be honest, I am going to miss this opportunity to express my opinions in such a prestigious and widely-read forum. Being famous, or infamous, has been interesting. It forced me to evaluate a belief I had that with celebrity comes responsibility--to always strive to be accurate and fair no matter how passionate the belief. More importantly, I am going to miss my interactions with the hundreds of you who have written me over the years. It has been a true pleasure. I have relished the praise as well as the damnation. I have made new friends. I also have treasured the many things I have learned from what is clearly the smartest readership in the industry. 

Yes. William Shakespeare got it correct in Romeo and Juliet: “Parting is such sweet sorrow!”

Peter Bernstein can be reached at pb111451@optonline.net.