Microsoft, Yahoo! and the myth of the dumb pipe

So where’s the service provider bid for Yahoo! now that it’s on the market?

Obviously, it’s nowhere to be seen. And that’s a good, sensible thing. It also tells us a lot about how service providers view themselves, regardless of what many observers want to make of them, or even what they sometimes say they want to make of themselves.

On the Web, Microsoft and Yahoo! are in the media business. It’s a tough business to be in, and while the Web is technology-driven, much of it is still based on the metrics of media: audience, reach and cost-per-thousand.

The problem isn’t that Yahoo! isn’t a good fit for service providers — it’s that the media business isn’t a good fit.

Carriers are in the bit business — always have been, always will be. That’s not pejorative. It doesn’t mean they are “dumb pipes.” Far from it. Sending TV sitcoms or pop music snippets down the pipes doesn’t make a network “smart.”

Today’s networks are already “smart” and getting smarter. They can deliver service guarantees. They can differentiate between and deliver different sorts of traffic, from voice to data to video.

Sitting behind that, of course, are management and billing systems, customer and location databases, application servers and hosting centers. Many of those systems are siloed today, but that is changing. Whether via IP multimedia subsystem or Web services, application programming interfaces (APIs) into those systems — as well as into end-user devices, from cell phones to set-tops — are being created and exposed.

All of this infrastructure — networks and software and device endpoints — is used to serve real customers with names, not anonymous cookie-based representations, that carriers can serve, mine and market toward.

Service providers, of course, know even more about their customers. They know where they live. They know where they are when they make a cell call. They know about their presence — when they’re available and when they’re not. It’s true these strengths are in some cases reality and in others only promise. But it’s in those potential strengths that the future for service providers will be found.

In that equation, carriers don’t own content or media. They don’t try to collect audiences or produce the next big hit, negotiate contracts with content creators, or build the bright new shiny user interface.

They are part of an information ecosystem — supplier in one instance, partner in another, enabler in a third. Building the business models and monetizing their role in this ecosystem — enabling service mash-ups via network APIs; providing identity, location or presence information; delivering value-added billing, payment or fulfillment services; or crafting partnerships with advertising and media companies — will be job one.