今年の夏の課題

昨日、とある会合に参加しました。
インターネット関連のちょっと後ろ向きな議論があって、あまり後味の良くない２時間半でした。

気分を新たにしようとお気に入りのコラムへ。
50周年を迎えた米ハイウェイシステムと「ネットの中立」問題
は、同じようなニュアンスを感じる部分もあるのですが、やはりシリコンバレーでは「後ろ向きに考えると何も生まれない」というアメリカのスピリットが強いのでしょうね。もちろん、色々なバランスを取るのは難しいのですが。

さて、「アメリカ独立記念日」というキーワードが３日間続くことになりましたが、今年の夏もアメリカの通信業界はどうなるのかな・・・というある編集者のつぶやきです。

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The story of the summer
By Dan O'Shea
How was your Fourth of July? Did you blow off a few fireworks, or were there nuclear missiles involved? Either way, we hope you still have your digits.

It was a four-day weekend for most of us--and if it wasn't for you, you either need a new boss or more help. These four-day weekends are indeed rare, and they can have kind of a strange effect on one mentally. A normal two-day weekend is nothing more than a breather, a chance to catch up on your personal life and take longer bathroom breaks. A four-day weekend is almost like a full week, almost enough for you to forget what you do and how you do it. (Trust me, I just took a two-week vacation, and I'm still trying to remember my name...)

And, usually, all the good stuff happens while we're gone: The boss gets canned, Herb in sales has a nervous breakdown and is found naked and cowering under his desk, the receptionist breaks up with the Fed Ex guy and everybody's mail ends up in Poughkeepsie.

Not so with a four-day national holiday weekend. Not much at all happened in the telecom industry the last four days or so--which you probably have figured out if you have read this far.

The rest of this week will probably be more of the same, with all the important people in the industry (and I mean, of course, the PR folks), likely on vacation for the rest of the week.

That leaves us to ponder what have been the big telecom stories of this summer. The biggest story so far is a gimme--the planned merger of the network equipment units of Nokia and Siemens. A lot of people, including Telephony, are saying that it could be the trigger for much more vendor consolidation. Another way to look at it is that it's just another deal following the real trigger--the planned merger of Alcatel and Lucent Technologies. Still another way to see it is as just another domino falling in the aftermath of the original--AT&T's planned acquisition of BellSouth, which gave real market reasons for vendors to consolidate. Yet another way of viewing it is through a longer kaleidoscope of history--can the argument be made that the Nokia-Siemens deal is somehow the kind of thing that was bound to happen when Bell Atlantic and Nynex got together a decade ago?

These big deals are all beginning to feel like part of the natural evolution--and attrition--of the industry that already has been going on for a long time.

Aside from the Nokia-Siemens deal, I'm honestly at a loss to come up with another big telecom industry story that has broken so far this summer. But, like I said, I can't even remember my name.

E-mail me at doshea@telephonyonline.com.

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色々書いてありますが、やはりケータイ業界の動きが気になるけど・・・という部分。

日本でも新しいケータイが毎週のように
(７月４日には2つもあったと「esにいろいろ驚いた1日」に書いてありますが・・・)
発表されています。

ボーダフォンライブ！のトップページに「Yahoo!モバイル」
という記事にちょっと眉をひそめ、
ソフトバンクは「Ｊフォン」になれるか
にそうそう、とうなづく私はやはり番号ポータビリティを機に乗り換えをすべきなのか、とまた悩み始めるのですけどね。