Red Teaming the Decade Ahead

Billions of IoTs or Quad Play, $12 smartphones and Internet from the sky?

Now that all those forecasts of the year and decade ahead are behind us, along with New Year’s Resolutions, it’s time to take a more balanced look.  Yes, the AI, the IoT, the 5G, plus security threats and consolidations, all loom ahead but are these the drivers that will really shape the industry, the players and our lives in the next decade?

We have always found reviews of what is to come best done after taking a hard look at what has passed—and how this reflected or departed from the projections of pundits and industry insiders.  Sometimes looking into the rearview mirror can suggest what’s ahead better than climbing the nearest tree thinking we will see over the horizon.  In fact, what history teaches is that the “gospel future,” as pronounced at a decade’s outset, almost never prevails (see Santayana’s Telecom Insights).

Applying this lesson today, Apple, Huawei and the FAANGs, stunning as they are, will almost definitely not be the top leaders of the sector as the decade ends.  Why?  Because with only one exception (Nokia from about 1995 to 2010), the telecom and digital leaders of one decade have not prevailed in the next, at least not since AT&T’s breakup in the 1980s.   Instead, the rising stars and leaders have come from the four corners of the globe and from different industries—not from predictions at the decade’s outset.  Think Nortel and MCI in the 80s (and DDI, the long-distance entrant in Japan, which set an all-time record in startup revenues), Motorola and Vodafone in the 1990s, or Huawei, Apple and Google more recently.

So, what might happen in the decade ahead, the twenty teens?  Will it be the take-over of the sector by China Inc., its FAANGs (known as BATs for Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) along with Huawei and Xiaomi, and even mobile behemoth, China Mobile, whose global ambitions are starting to show?  With its billion subscribers, China Mobile already has almost as many as the next three mobile operators combined, and leads in 5G as well.  Or could an “unexpected” consolidation produce the next leader—AT&T/Vodafone? Facebook/Netflix? Airtel/America Movil?  Meanwhile, others are betting on an app-based surge spreading across the world along with IoT, wearables (see the next article), home clouds, AR and AI.

“Smart everything: There will be 500 billion connectable smart devices by the end of this decade.” So says Bank of America’s Haim Israel in recent Barron’s.  Should this be true, chances are it won’t be one of the winners from past decades that will be in control.  Maybe the resulting killer app will be one that allows individuals to interface with all the new smart devices—in the home, at the office and on the street, handling the infinite passwords and segues involved like a virtual Swiss Army Knife.  All this while culling information relevant to the user and posting it through an oral interface or implant.

Who then might control such a poly-app product with all its streaming updates and service refinements along with the billions of other smart devices, if not Apple, Alphabet or Amazon Web Services?  Could the surprise come from the developing world, where prepaid mobile first appeared (Mexico 1992) as did mobile money (Kenya, 2007).   There may be other candidates as well.  Quad Play?  Internet from the sky?  $12 smartphones—$30 ones are already on the market—for the 5 billion without them today, perhaps carried on the wrist?  Whatever… we will be surprised.