Ruzicka countered that “that's reining in the marketing guys. That's not reining in the engineers.” This gets to a deeper issue. The engineers will do what is necessary to solve a problem or meet a need, but have little cause to exceed their mandate. Marketing personnel often promise that which cannot be delivered. There must be a meeting of minds.

Margitta stated that one reason for the complexity is that “no one wants to compete on price.” Indeed, the quest for new customers in the telecom space is more likely to opt for more and better services rather than lower cost.

Ruzicka responded that there is some room for adjustment based on the target customer. “In every other business, there's a retail model and a custom model.” While retail models will do for the masses, some demand a different class of service. That requires customization. “If your organization is matrixed to consider that, you're ok.”

The Changing Role of Service Providers

Where do telecom operators go from here? Willets stated that there are basically two options: There's the retailing model, in which the potential revenue is all downstream, coming from subscribers. Conversely, a new model is emerging that involves upstream users paying for service through advertising and the like. That's the Telco 2.0 model. “If the value of your product goes to zero, how do you make a living?” The realities of the current market indicate that voice service may be just the sort of service that may drop in value to zero. How can telcos respond? “You might try to invent new products,” said Willetts. “So far, the telecommunications industry shows itself to be not quite good at that at all.”

Another idea is that the CSPs can stick to their core competency, which is enabling services to exist. That may, Willetts asserted, involve being the white-labeled communications inside someone else's product. The biggest device splash of the year tells just such a tale. “AT&T has positioned itself, I think rather unwittingly, as the 'intel inside' of iPhone. Unlike any other phone you'd buy from AT&T, which AT&T would activate and control, you buy an iPhone from the Apple store and take it home and activate it through iTunes. That makes Apple, effectively, an MVNO. Apple effectively becomes the service. It's just powered by AT&T.” Willets makes these points in order to raise the question of what the future of product management may look like, suggesting that “just as we get our arms around retail product management inside telcos, they might not be retail products at all for much longer.”