Qwest CEO: It’s the interface, stupid

Ed Mueller

Qwest’s Ed Mueller envisions in-home integration

Edward Mueller’s view of the future sets him apart from most telecom CEOs. The chairman and CEO of Qwest Communications grew up in the Bell industry but most recently spent four years in retail. And unlike his fellow CEOs, he’s not building Qwest into a company that will deliver its own voice, data, video and wireless services to its consumer customers.

Instead, Mueller is pointing Qwest toward a different kind of future, based on delivering massive amounts of bandwidth into each home, partnering where needed for wireless and video services and trying to keep a finger on the pulse of the up and coming markets.

Key to that future, Mueller believes, is the development of a new kind of interface, one that ties together technology in the home and enables consumers to access whatever they want.

“There will be an interface, it will look like an iPhone, perhaps, that you can scroll through to do everything you want,” Mueller said in an interview earlier this month. “Everything I’ve seen in my lifetime, the technology has been the forerunner, but the interface has been the enabler. With computers, the integrator wasn’t the Internet, it was the browser.”

The iPod created a new user interface that became the definitive way of downloading music and then video from the Internet, Mueller points out, then the iPhone defined a new means of doing mobile content.

“The home interface is still yet to come, but this is where I want Qwest to play,” Mueller said.

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