I was reading part of Moshe Yudkowsky’s book “The Pebble and the Avalanche” in which he discusses the revolutionary potential of “taking things apart” or disaggregation. He talks a lot about the breakup of the AT&T monolith; and about how internet telephony disassociates the network transport from the actual voice application. This last break up is something we really focus on in our work.

Whenever you are creating something new out of something that exists—there is the issue of how it can be manipulated. How can it be taken apart? Where are the seams? Some of them are amazingly, intransigently invisible—30 years ago who would have thought that you could have a telephone call without a telephone company?

Constantly driving deep into a system over time, allows you to find “disassembly” edges that are not obvious. In communications, the industry has come to recognize a few key elements which were seemingly whole but are clearly not. We are aided by a primary creative force in our communication age, which is shifting communications from  old analog structures into computationally manageable components. This helps us envision elements that come apart:

• The transport for voice and how the voice is experienced by the user are surprisingly not the same thing. Whether telephone, VoIP or radio, the user experience of the voice application need no longer be dictated by the reality of radio waves or sound transport. Most of our applications don’t actually do much if anything with this fact, but we could.
• The liveness assumptions of the act speaking in person to another need not always be reflected in a digitally mediated conversation. And we do a little of that with voice, but with a system, voicemail, that still assumes the speaker much be in a live connection with the system.
• Speakers (initiators) and listeners (receivers) need not pay attention at the same time. We use this fact in text (such as email) but not very effectively with voice.
• The device and the message type need not be tied together: I do live voice with this device; I only can get or leave voice messages with a phone.  We can pick up our email from anywhere because it lives in the cloud; what if voice were the same. Why can’t I get (or make) my communications anywhere on any device, whether they are live or messaged, but still be able to also get them everywhere?
• Why are message media (text, live voice, messaged voice, video) tied to different applications? In a purely digital world, it’s all data. Why not precisely the same mechanisms?  And how would that simplify the user experience?
• In the tactical world, the pervasive tie to “liveness” originated by the nature of radio frequency technology has created protocols dependent on “live or nothing”; what if that was a choice that you didn’t have to make? What if you can have live and, if live is not possible, something much better than nothing?

The second (and third and fourth) step in creating new things by disassembling old things is figuring what to put back together and how. At this week’s eComm Conference, this will be a major source of discussion. As the telecommunications markets, platforms, and applications dissagregate, what shall we all make of it?