Comcast, Time Warner, Sprint…deals, deals, deals keep a’coming
They’re in, they’re out! Just last month, Sprint and Clearwire attempted another deal to launch a disruptive telecom service based on WiMax. This time the ill-fated deal was with Time Warner and Comcast. This deal unraveled this week.
Is it over? No not by a long shot.
Fuld & Company ran a war game on March 4 to stress test the strategic positions of the cable companies, the telcos, the investment houses, and even Google, all of whom jumped into the FCC auction that concluded in the same month.
Once we introduced this little disruption, all the teams began to talk to each other, no one wanted to be left at the alter. The deal announced a wireless (based on the new WiMax spectrum made available from the FCC auction) mega-deal.
If there is an intelligence lesson here, it’s in two parts: (1) Deals happen, to paraphrase a bumper sticker. In any active, high risk markets certain players will always jump into the waters early. The press often follows closely behind, stirring up interest. While we are all reading the press, such as “Comcast Time Warner discuss nationwide WiMax Plan,” on March 25, Associated Press wire service, it seems that more deals will come. Then, (2) we see the deal falling apart no even one month later. The second lesson lies with the fact that even good intelligence, as teased out of a war game event, may be true but may also foretell bad decision making on the part of others.
In fact, the war game also foretold other quieter changes: That Google will do a “little evil” and start forming alliances with various telecom carriers to carry its mobile search engine. Nokia and other handset makers may start dealing with Intel – because they will have little choice. The carriers’ so-called walled gardens, where consumers can only buy phones locked into one network or another, are soon to become history – whether or not the phone carriers like it.
These quieter events – not nearly so dramatic – are the ones you need to look for. They are also intelligence products from the same war game. Yes, the dramatic, the mega deals will happen, but they may not be as powerful as the powerfully (but quietly) game changing activities moving around in the background as we speak.
