It's been quite a week for news this week, and not just the run of the mill product announcements, customer wins and such. Some rather big things went down this week, and the TMCnet family of bloggers was all over the important developments.
It seems like a month has gone by, but in fact it was just this week that Obama officially tapped his former Harvard law classmate Julius Genachowski to head up the Federal Communications Commission or FCC. According to his bio, he was chief counsel to former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, a VC and led the development of the president-elect's technology and innovation agenda.
Rich also covered the ascension of Carol Bartz to the position of CEO at Yahoo!
I am impressed and concerned. Bartz has an excellent resume with honors and awards as long as anyone...
What the company really needs is someone who has effectively led a small to medium media company in the last 18 months and understands the needs of advertisers and more importantly how to get them to spend more money with Yahoo. Her resume, while impressive includes Sun and 3M.
Basically zero media experience.
Is this bad? I am not sure. You don't know how someone meshes into an organization until they take the job.
It is worth mentioning Bartz should be effective at negotiating with other companies and could strike big deals which bring in revenue. From this perspective she has the appropriate resume.
The news spread like wildfire that a Verizon executive spoke to a Bloomberg reporter about a world, just seven years hence, when the carrier would no longer be offering voice over copper lines. So I thought, ok, yeah, that's worthy of inclusion on my blog. The next day, Verizon's senior VP of media relations Eric Rabe said, effectively: Not True! Which, I thought was, you know... worthy of inclusion in my blog too. The upshot? As Rabe wrote in the company's Verizon Policy blog:
The Verizon traditional phone system will serve customers for a long time to come.
Perhaps the biggest story in telecom this week was Nortel filing for bankruptcy. Rich was ahead of the curve with his initial post, and then several of us followed, weighing in from various angles. I addressed the issue here and here, Tom Keating wrote about the Nortel situation on his VoIP and Gadgets Blog that
...perhaps we in the media should carefully consider what we say ... Sometimes the media and bloggers are way too gleeful when a company 'titan' takes a fall.
Rich followed up his original post with an interview he did with Nortel Enterprise President Joel Hackney, where Hackney played down the bankruptcy element of the week's events and focused on the restructuring.
Peter Radizeski gives his insights here.
David Byrd added his thoughts on his SIP and Serve blog, noting that as Nortel falls, another company in this space, AudioCodes, is rising.
And Brendan Read wrote a great piece about Nortel from the Canadian political perspective, and that any potential dismantling of Nortel to US firms would likely be a tough sell. Brendan, a Canadian with a political science background, writes that such a purchase in whole is not likely to happen:
...because Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, cannot afford to let his minority Conservative government be ousted from power by the Opposition Liberals who now have a new, smart (and U.S.-educated) leader, Michael Ignatieff, on the albeit simplistic flag-waving nationalistic issue of keeping Nortel Canadian.
HD Voice, or high-definition voice, based on wideband audio codecs was in the TMC blog buzz this week as we announced plans to host a panel exploring the benefits of this emerging technology at the upcoming ITEXPO.
Rich, who will serve as the moderator of the panel, which features speakers from Polycom, AudioCodes, Texas Instruments, Octasic, and Alteva offered up some excellent analysis of the technology in his post, Communications Must Go HD.
Writing on TMCnet's VoIP and Video over IP blog, GIPS VP of engineering Jan Linden continues the discussion of HD Conferencing as he describes a way to approximate a telepresence experience at a much lower cost.
Kim Devlin-Allen, writing in her IP Communications Design blog, revisits the issue of the health and vitality of VoIP and comes away with a positive feeling.
I had the opportunity to brainstorm on the future of VoIP with some of the leading IT managers on the west coast, and they overwhelmingly agreed that for their enterprises, it is no longer a question of if they will deploy VoIP, but rather when those deployments occur. Although the current state of the economy may affect the pace of deployments, I think it's fair to say that the enterprise market is committed to merging their voice and data networks and is moving in the direction of full IP.
I wonder what Hunter Newby would say? For one thing we can expect he would make his case for proper naming conventions, as he takes the position in his VoIPeering blog that VoIP is NOT Internet Telephony.
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