Chris Sacca's 'What is left?'

Hello Moto?

I was fortunate this past week to have the opportunity to attend the All Things Digital Conference put on by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal. The event is a melange of intimate interviews of tech titans spliced with demos of new products. Gates, Jobs, Diller, Otellini, etc., all took the stage. Between sessions, participants mingled over lunch, dinner, even wine tasting.  It would be futile to try to recap all of the action here. Nonetheless, one theme that emerged never ceases to intrigue me.

Jobs was asked about his feelings for the mobile carriers and replied by labeling them as "orifices". The term stuck and was used throughout the show as a wide cast of characters who have had to appease the carriers let off a little steam.

The reaction of Motorola's Ed Zander to the same question, though restrained, clearly evidenced  frustration. Here is a guy who depends upon carriers to put his handsets in consumer hands, yet, he has a demonstrated taste for paths to carrier disintermediation. For instance, Zander  flashed us the iTunes phone his crew developed with Apple. The two companies inked a licensing deal to make this happen last July and the handset has been ready for a while now. However, not surprisingly, virtually every US mobile carrier has rejected any deal to carry the device as they are almost all planning their own music download services launching this Fall. It sounds like Zander has talked just one carrier into releasing his stuff soon.

We are at an interesting inflection point in the history of interaction between the service providers and the handset makers. In a market with such disloyal customers, the carriers need to do everything they can to fight churn. It might seem that the impetus for consumer (non-enterprise)  spending in this space is who offers the swankiest handset. That is, with Motorola pushing 30.3M units in the last quarter thanks to the success of the RAZR V3 one has to wonder whether the hardware will drive consumer choice like during the Star-Tac days. Maybe the applications will have similar draw.  I think it would be a mistake for the carriers to underestimate the lock-in of iTunes.

Whatever the case, it is interesting to note that Motorola under Zander's leadership has made three  other significant moves toward creating a base for disintermediation of the carriers. First, Motorola bought MeshNetworks, a maker of wireless mesh routing software and hardware. Though the company has traditionally only  served public safety customers for police and fire municipal networks in the licensed spectrum, MeshNetworks is well-suited to provide WiFi connectivity for public access - a nightmare for 3G providers.

Moreover, Motorola has been working for over a year to perfect dual-mode handsets with WiFi chipsets. These phones will be sold directly to enterprises and integrated with their PBXs for local voice and will fall back to the carriers for roaming. 

To cap this effort, earlier this year,  Motorola signed a deal with Skype to collaborate, presumably, on the distribution of Skype clients on Motorola handsets. While the carriers would certainly reject an OEM of a Skype client in their consumer units, it remains to be seen whether they will tolerate such software to win/maintain enterprise deployments. Carrier leverage may be too weak.

How this will all sort out is anyone's guess. Motorola would be the first to dismiss these efforts as simply ways to ensure the 'seamless mobility' of their users. However, when you see a company make significant investments ($200M+) in the tools necessary for realizing  public WiFi networks, build hardware that talks over such networks, and partner with the world leader in software for doing so, well, exciting times are ahead.

 

April Drought and the Veil Is Lifted . . .

Whoa. It is embarrassing to consider that I went the entire month of April without a single post. Of course, as the time passes, the pressure to type truly earth-shattering prose mounts until a moment of clarity in which you realize that 1) no one really cares as much about your blog as you do though 2) getting your second email message in a week asking if you are dead is a little spooky.

That said, as I look back at my posting regularity it tends to ebb and flow with inverse proportion to how cool my projects at work are.  Just wrapping up the paperwork on a deal? Posts can be expected. Getting my head around an entirely new space? Best just to catch me next month.

Part of this comes from the fact that for the past two years I have never written here about what I do for a living and for whom I work.  Considering the publicity that my company tends to attract, it was always helpful to just avoid the noise and travel in relative anonymity. I would do a panel or a speech now and then and ask the hosts not to publicize my involvement on the web. Eventually though, this became hard to balance against an increasingly public role in the company.

A couple of months ago I flew down to New Zealand and keynoted a fun symposium on start-ups, venture capital, and tech transfer. The Kiwis are great people and I had a blast mixing it up with them. With press in the room though, it was inevitable that my challenge to the entire country to undertake blogging would make it to print.  Thus started a small wave of exposure that would eventually undo my anonymity.

At the same time, my role here at the company has very distinctly evolved over the last year. I was originally hired as a lawyer and businessperson for data center and connectivity deals. However, those of you who are familiar with my insatiable curiosity and boundless ambition for knowledge and experience can imagine that, within weeks of arriving, I just started to stick my nose into anything where I thought I could help out. Soon, I was helping teams conceive of new products, championing acquisitions,  and doing deals across the company. The people here are incredible mentors and colleagues and work became more fun every day.

It was therefore a great pleasure when we found a fabulous lawyer and some more negotiators to assume many of my old duties here and make a little room in my day for my new role as a Principal in the New Business Development Group here at Google. New Business Development? We cover the full gamut of fresh opportunities for the company to grow. New spaces we should enter? Companies with whom we should partner? Products we are missing? Good teams or individuals who want to come work for us? All this stuff falls onto my plate at some point and makes my job  undoubtedly one of the most rewarding and intriguing in the world.

So, in that light, an  ask from you, the readers. Are you a superstar deal person with a bit of a geeky background? Want to come join Google? Leave me a link to your resume and let me know which of these jobs interests you.

In the meantime, welcome to all the new Microsoft search bots that I am sure this post will attract.