Disney: On second thought

Isn't it amazing how fast things can change? One minute you're Leo on the front of the Titanic screaming, "I'm king of the world." The next, you and your blue lips are sleeping down deep in the brine. One minute you're designing new features for a Disney phone, the next you're sitting on your couch with your one-hitter watching Elephants on Parade -- over and over and over -- or your sitting on your jute rug with your hookah pipe watching skinny cattle roam the street.

Fortunes change. I wonder how many people left good, solid jobs to take a ground floor opportunity with Disney to work on its mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) business with high-in-the-sky, apple-pie hopes. I'll bet they believed the risk-reward factor leaned heavily in their favor. Who could blame them? I would have done it had I known anything about building an MVNO business. It was a good bet.

And I'll be darned if they didn't come up with a real nice product, too. The features were unique and seemed to be what every Wonder Bread-eating family was asking for. So what was the problem? There are surely some underlying business issues at play that I'm unaware of, but perhaps it's simply this: a company like Disney can afford to go through this whole exercise knowing it would fail just to learn something.

Service providers can't. However, their service delivery process in the near future is going to have to follow the same logic. They'll have to be able to throw services against the wall and see what sticks, and they'll have to be able to sweep them up off the floor and dispose of them if they don't. And they'll have to do it for (I'm guessing) less than 1% of the cost Disney is still reluctant to reveal it invested in its MVNO.

The best thing about Disney deciding to surrender its MVNO is that perhaps it has positive implications for how relationships between content companies and carriers will play out in the future. If big content providers like Disney see the best business case is to let the carriers and wireless operators distribute its content, then perhaps the rest of the content and media industry will follow and the phone companies will not live out the rest of their days as dumb pipes -- a fate worse than death; you can't even smoke those.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@telephonyonline.com.