For those of you who saw Yahoo Senior VP Brad Garlinghouse’s Voice 2.0 talk at VON last year, or who have read Alec Saunders Voice 2.0 Manifesto, this Phone Call 2.0 blog post will sound somewhat familiar.
In my view we are in the 2.0 world, but with companies largely being led by 1.0 type thinkers. Lots of the great ideas found in the labs of companies like Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, Intel and Microsoft are not yet ready for prime time, not because they aren’t good ideas, or because they don’t work. They are and they do. It’s becaue the brand manager and company top executives are living in the world of what’s safe.
It takes a real leader to break ranks and gear for the future, saying damn it to hell, we’re going for it. Craig McCaw did that twice in cellular and now he’s getting ready to do the same thing with ClearWire. While the battles are fierce, start with Qualcomm and their surrogates at Verizon and other CDMA customers, his idea to bridge data at high speed with voice is going to work and more importantly will cause others to follow suit.