A Dinosaur turns Orange

I wasn't at O'Reilly's eTel conference to hear it, but apparently Norman Lewis, director of research for France Telecom gave a remarkable presentation.  Luckily, Lee Dryburgh has a nearly complete transcription in his blog.  Here's Lee's summary of Norman Lewis' keynote:

...voice will become embedded in pretty much the same way that time has become embedded in everything (on wrist watches, cellphones etc). France Telecom will be offering an open platform via APIs for developers to combine the best of both worlds; grassroots innovation and a rock solid, telco scalable network underpinning. France telecom will collect and then presumably offer some kind of dip into customer data and metadata to provide underpinnings of exciting new services. FT will offer authentication, identity management functionality and customer care services to application builders. France Telecom sees the future as opening up innovation all the way to the edges and sharing their network assets with innovators. Applications of particular interest are powered by social networking and social software.  Norman was certainly in the top three of keynote speakers, both in terms of content, style and delivery. I think his speech was the most spot on I have heard come out of any telco, let alone an incumbent operator.

Wow!  I too find it incredible to hear these words from an incumbent operator, even one that has aggressively moved into mobile (under the Orange brand) and fostered a variety of innovative research -- first under the interesting name Orange Imagineering and now under the watered-down name Orange Advanced Services Development.

Reading Lee's more detailed transcription, I'm not optimistic that FT/Orange can carry this off.  They are too tied to the FT/Orange network.

Norman identifies customer relationships and customer support as a strength -- fair enough.  But he plans to leverage this into leadership in authentication and identity management, on the FT/Orange network.  How will that compete with emerging Identity 2.0 players who are targeting the Internet, i.e. the world?

Similarly, he talked about offering APIs for a personalization platform called Octave but again it's tied into the FT/Orange network.

So I fear it doesn't matter whether it's called France Telecom or Orange.  Incumbent operators naturally want to leverage their existing networks, but this will doom them to be disrupted by start-ups that recognize the Internet as the communication platform of the future.

Comments

[Lee]

I had the hope/impression that what he was aiming at was marrying off the best of the telco network (identity, authentication, mass subscriber databases including location) with their Wanadoo (ISP) arm. I presumed a fair bulk of the voice applications would use the Internet (Wanadoo). If this is true then it heralds something exciting and spot on!