Today, April 18, 2011 marks my first official blog. It is about making money and having fun. Actually I started blogging about telecommunications 20 years ago on Wall Street with my TelNotes daily and SpectralShifts weekly. Looking back, I am happy to report that a lot of what I said about the space actually took place; consolidation, wireless usurpation of wireline access, IP growing into something more robust than a 4 layer stack, etc… Over the past decade I’ve watched the advent of social media, and application ecosystems, and the collapse of the competitive communications sector; the good, the bad, and the ugly, respectively.
Along the way I’ve participated in or been impacted by these trends as I helped startups and small companies raise money and improve their strategy, tactics and operations. Overall, an entirely different perspective from my ivory tower Wall Street research perch of the 1980s-90s. Hopefully what I have to say is of use to a broad audience and helps people cut through contradictory themes of chaotic convergence and diverging demand to take advantage of the rapidly shifting landscape.
I like examples of reality imitating art. One of my favorites was Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which preceded the destruction of the Berlin Wall by a decade. Another, the devastating satire and 1976 classic Network, predating by 30 years what media has become in the age of reality TV, twitter and the internet moment. I feel like a lot has changed and it’s time for me to start talking again. So in the words of Howard Beale (Peter Finch) “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”
Most of the time you’ll see me take an opposite stance from consensus, or approach a topic or problem from a 90 degree angle. That’s my intrinsic value; don’t look for consensus opinion here. The ability to do this lies in my analytical framework, called the InfoStack. It is a three dimensional framework that maps information, topics and problems along geographic, network and application dispersions. By geographic I mean WAN, MAN, LAN, PAN. By network, I mean a 7 layer OSI stack. And by applications, I mean clouds of intersecting demand. You will see that I talk about horizontal layering and scale, vertically complete solutions, and unlimited “cloud-like” revenue opportunity. Anything I analyze is in the context of what is going on in adjacent spaces of the matrix. And I look for cause and effect amongst the layers.
I see us at the beginning of something very big; bigger than in 1987 at the dawn of the Wintel revolution. The best way to enjoy the great literary authors is to start with their earliest works and read sequentially; growing and developing with them. Grow with me as we sit at the dawn of the Infomedia revolution that is and will remake the world around us. In the process, let’s make some money and build things that are substantial.
