What has hotmail got to do with Disaggregation?

Last week I said that If anyone can overcome challenges and really make the transformations possible, it is the Telecom Operator. But I was wrong, Telecom Operators are not ready or willing or capable, well most of them. And disaggregation is already happening, then who is leading it?

Everyone has heard about open source and many of us have been waiting on the fence to see if this trend takes up. Not willing to declare our stake in the game. This is more like Gartner’s Hype Cycle, there are a few early adopters, and many times they are not able to drive the ecosystem or create a momentum to make things happen. Many good technologies, that could have shaped our future are buried in the past because of the fence sitters.

So what has hotmail got to do with it? I guess “Need” and “Limitations”.

Ask a telecom operator to double the network capacity every 6 months while reducing the cost to half. The Operator will look at you and think only about which mental asylum is the nearest one to send you to. They are used to a style of working, steady growth and stable environments.

Ask Airtel, what stopped them in being the first one to push Data lead growth in the market, they were very well poised, first to launch in 4G, biggest optical network (aside from BSNL) in India.

They did not have the need!

A paradigm shift is difficult at best. They were in the denial till Jio broke through their dreams. And I have to give credit that Airtel is still standing, while most of the other telco’s have disappeared, even Vodafone and Idea had to merge to stay relevant.

Over and over, it is the outsiders who have shaken the market and then others just start to wonder “Who took my Cheese?”

Well coming back to Hotmail, they are not the telecom operator but they understood the value of disaggregation. What did they disaggregate? They disaggregated the customer from the telco. Earlier the phone number, sms gave the customer an Identity and telco owned the Identity.

So they thought the subscribers are their customers, a captive pool to sell to. They added value-added services and thought that they can continue to mint money. Well, Hotmail changed the game. They started giving subscribers a new identity, a universal ID, not linked to any phone number or operator, accessible anywhere, anytime. You can move from one operator to another, one technology to another, one device to another, one country to another, you were still you. How many of you remember the valuation of Hotmail?

Next week we will build on this aspect of disaggregation and now this led to more and more. so stay tuned.