IPUrbia

Another post on the AT&T U-Verse product (AT&T’s triple play product), this time forecasting utter doom for the solution because of an upcoming standard in IPTV will obsolete their proprietary solution:

Could this new standard make AT&T’s and Microsoft’s gamble on their own proprietary technology be the nail in the coffin for U-verse? Certainly, a standards-based approach will eventually result in lower costs to deploy due to economies of scale when multiple vendors all use the same technology. This could give AT&T/Microsoft’s competitors a cost advantage. Who would have thought that mega-titans AT&T and Microsoft would bet on the wrong horse using proprietary technology? Wait a minute, AT&T and Microsoft are the KINGS of proprietary technology, so I shouldn’t be surprised. The difference is that 20 years ago you could get away with it – now with open-source and standards along with a global economy, a standards-based approach is the only way to go.

I tend to worry about the solution simply because they looked to Microsoft to scale to a massive real-time solution based on Windows Server platform. The telling aspect as to the strength of Microsoft’s real-time capabilities is who chooses them–large, boring corporations with little imagination and very little innovation.

Still, as to whether standards will actually matter in this is another story. I’m a huge fan of standards, but that is because I like my technology nice and interoperable. Microsoft has been able to buck the standards trend because they are large enough to set the standard. When you have 90%+ market share, the other 10% can talk about standards all they want, at the end of the day, 90% of the world is using Word and 75-80% is using IE/ActiveX.

Similarly, AT&T has enough economic clout on this to power a small sub-industry specifically centered around their proprietary platform. The cost differences (assuming that Microsoft pulls some scalability out of their golden butt) will take some time to actually trickle down to the market, and, even then, it will simply put them at a disadvantage in that particular aspect over the next few years. The real question, however, is whether they’ll stick with Microsoft on this: cable/telecom loves standards because it avoids vendor lock-in, and, if Microsoft doesn’t start delivering some scalability, and delivering fast, they may find themselves without a customer. In the end, this is not much different than any other standard implementations in the industry–pre-DOCSIS, pre-SONET, pre-MPEG. The communication companies generally came out of the transition looking better as did the vendors–if they got with the program.