The race goes to the swift

Of all the interesting facts I uncovered in reporting this week’s Telephony story, The Seven-Year Hitch,  which explores RBOC efforts to bring IP Centrex to market, the one I found most intriguing was the tidbit on how long it has taken. By any measure, seven years is a long time. Granted, the Bell companies are held to standards other telecom companies—and most companies outside of telecom—are not. Ensuring that any offering brought to market is five-nines reliable is a weighty burden that drives the methodical and deliberate approach the RBOCs take to product development.

But to understand just how long seven years really is, consider the following: From the time Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 to the surrender of Japan, World War II was fought in just under six years; from the time President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan project in 1941, it took the United States three and a half years to develop, build and test a working atomic bomb; and from the time President John Kennedy declared in 1961 that the U.S. would land an astronaut on the moon and bring that person back safely, it took the National Aeronautic and Space Administration a smidgen over eight years to accomplish mankind’s single most remarkable technological feat.

As complex as IP Centrex might be from an engineering perspective, it isn’t rocket science. Given their considerable financial resources and the equally impressive brainpower working for them, the RBOCs should have been able to move faster on this. Slow and steady wins the race is a nice bedtime story, but in a business environment where everything moves at warp speed, victory goes to the quick and nimble. As formidable competitors race to get into IP telephony, the Bells likely will rue how long it took them to move IP Centrex along the development path.