How I Found Myself in Berlin
/Lessons for all ages at all times - from a 21 year old taking an 'experience' year (I'm trying to stop use of the word gap!!). Samanee Mahbub shares with honesty, vulnerability and truth - read, think, apply.
Lessons for all ages at all times - from a 21 year old taking an 'experience' year (I'm trying to stop use of the word gap!!). Samanee Mahbub shares with honesty, vulnerability and truth - read, think, apply.
Once upon a time, a paragon of American innovation lost its way. It embodied Einstein’s definition of insanity, spending over $200B for a train wreck… and they’re doing it again. The story starts in the last century and my part about 28 years ago.
In the early 90’s at AT&T, I was on a ‘special project’ with some friends to design the next generation core domestic network. We were from Bell Labs and had “grown up” with the Internet (Arpanet, initially). We were young and idealistic so our designed was based on the TCP/IP protocol. This let us move anything over the network – email, faxes, images, movies, songs, phone calls, photos, anything – in real time. We knew that with enough bandwidth, routers, redundancy and diversity, someday we’d watch or listen to concerts and movies live. This way, we only needed 1 network (with tons of security & safeguards obviously) to handle everything. The days of a voice-only network built on big expensive switches was over. We presented our design to the powers that were. Answer? Nope! They thought it was the dumbest thing they’d ever heard. [About 13 years later, a friend asked me if I still had the designs because they were looking to build that network.]
The 90’s were a battle between the network/telecom providers (AT&T, MCI, etc.) and the PC/Software maker end points (Microsoft) deciding where to put the ‘smarts’. Microsoft et. al., felt they owned the smarts and just needed commodity dumb pipes to connect them together. The networks knew if they didn’t have any ‘smarts’, they didn’t have any differentiable value from each other. The smart ends would win the battle, forever commoditizing the networks. I saw this and worked on this firsthand. It wasn’t pretty. It led to a lot of spending with little success:
The networks lost the smart-dumb battle. So, if it hadn’t worked before, why now? Is “Media” that different from smart-ends? Really? Maybe this is what they’re thinking:
Over 17 years, AT&T spent about $236B (BILLION) dollars to get in, out and back in to the cable and content business. Having lived through some of this and trying to show why it wouldn’t work financially, strategically, innovatively, and a bunch of other ‘ly’s, here are at least 6 lessons I learned:
Had a great time being interviewed by Lea Carey & Renee Hopkins about Women, Innovation, Life on "Women Who Innovate"!
Deb is here to reveal to organizations their beginner's mind while giving them the tools to execute.