The Plaything of the Purists

Someone who fancies himself a purist — and it is usually a he — might tell you in the most pretentious of terms that he prefers the character of an LP, known in the old days as an album, to the sterile sound of a digital music recording. You must know a guy like this. We all do. And we all know he’s full of beans. Just like we know he can’t possibly like that Captain Beefheart album as much as he says he does.

There is just no comparison between analog and digital. Everything digital has touched has turned to gold — except, perhaps, the exam and the wristwatch. Digital voice, digital television, digital music and even digital advertising are leaving their predecessors far behind. Analog has become the plaything of the purists.

And now digital television is taking an even bigger step up the evolutionary ladder — and for the purists of the evolutionary biology set, I know the ladder is a bad analogy for Darwin’s dangerous idea, but we’re just talking telecom here. Digital television, particularly IPTV, suddenly makes television a two-way medium. It makes it interactive. And to telecom folks, it’s about the coolest thing on the planet, or will be when someday it is fully functional.

The most un-cool thing on the planet — except perhaps to those who make their livings by it — is, unfortunately, billing. Billing is the 19-inch black-and-white to today’s high-definition plasma. It is the thick, vinyl 78 RPM record to today’s iPod. It is the rotary dial to today’s voice-activated dialing (which nobody uses, by the way.) However, unlike the LP, you can’t do without billing.

That’s why we found it interesting that in this issue we were able to contrast the cool with the seemingly un-cool. We looked at IPTV and its high hopes for interactive advertising (Cover story on Page 12), and on Page 26, DATAMATX CEO Harry Stephens looks at good old-fashioned billing and the power it still has as a transpromotional tool. These stories reiterate the age-old lesson that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. However, true beauty is in the eye of the CFO, and so far it looks like the billing system still has got it goin’ on, while IPTV and its interactive promise are all spindly legs and braces.

On Page 10, the billing business faces another challenge: bureaucracy. Service providers and the companies who print and mail bills on their behalf feel they’re in danger of being hamstrung by inefficient — and perhaps unconstitutional — tax policies. The governing board of the Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement thinks billers ought to get over themselves and pay up like everyone else. One thing is certain — taxes will never go the way of the LP.

Nor will software it seems. Ciena CEO Gary Smith gave B/OSS an exclusive interview to outline his company’s strategic shift toward a software architecture (Page 18). In that interview, he said, “Hardware platforms are important; they have to be efficient, effective, scalable and convergent. But, ultimately, the critical factor is software.” No doubt, there will be purists someday soon who swear by the reliability of a dedicated interface, who extol the virtues of the 10/100mbps Fast Ethernet Physical Interface Module and say with an air of superiority that there’s nothing like the hum of a multiport inverse multiplexing port adapter.

And the newbies who work in the Software Defined Networking group will look at her, because its no longer always a he, and say, “Wow, that’s so IT.”