Investing in Your Future This scenario actually describes the past year we've had in the U.S. local market, which has obviously become more open as barriers to competition have fallen or are about to fall. And the pie continues to grow. The strength of the economy has resulted in new businesses starting up as well as business expansion driving the installation of more phone lines and the consumption of ever-increasing minutes of long distance. This has instilled CEOs with the courage to spend money and take risks. For example, Microsoft invested $1 billion in Comcast. MCI took a one-time charge of $800 million to indicate how seriously it has invested in local service.

However, the eventual outcome of these types of investments is uncertain. One relative disillusionment has been the emergenc e of the supercarrier as the dominant trend. In the grand scheme of things, we were in a monopolistic environment scarcely 15 y ears ago and the era of the supercarrier looms large before us. For new players, this window of openness in the economy will not last long.

What We've Learned We've discovered that while it's easy to hate your local Baby Bell, it's far from easy to become one. We would like to imagine an economy that would support a multitude of consumer choices among highly specialized companies, but instead, it looks like we're heading for an era of giant communications corporations, each of which will bend over backwards in an attempt to be yet another mediocre regional Bell. This is a high price to pay for consolidated monthly billing statements.

Another shortfall has been the rate of technological change in the local market. The competition is still over simple dial tone--excuse me while I yawn. We appreciate price breaks, but what we really want are some choices on high-bandwidth services, not just DID lines. Recently, it took me the better part of five months to get an ISDN line installed in my home in high-tech Oregon (it's better here). If all we're getting out of this is a break on local lines, then that's just simple incremental improvement. If innovation is getting technology to market faster, then where are the innovations?

One shortfall in everyone's forecasts from last year, which I'm not shedding any tears over, is the current lack of cross-industry consolidation. We haven't seen the cable company become our phone company, the power company become our cable TV company or our local Bell become the home shopping channel. Many consumer groups were worried about deregulation. They were concerned that it would give large companies another avenue to become even larger and to take hold of the reins of content and media. But, we haven't seen that. (Although you may want to consider the relative contribution of push technologies.) We're seeing better, more effective competition am ong local access providers and among long-distance carriers, but we have yet to see any real competition among sectors. O n the other hand, we have obviously seen a lot of consolidation.