I KIND OF PITY JEAN MONTY. Sure, I bet he’s living very well off what’s probably an enormous retirement package, far removed from the VOIP and video and data wars of today, so I don’t feel too bad. Maybe just a twinge.
However, I feel the legacy most people dump on the former Bell Canada Enterprises CEO is a little unfair. He’s held up as the poster boy for the rising and then plummeting convergence comet of the early 00s even though he lost his job not because his vision was faulty, but because he used what turned out to be expired tactics to execute what was a pretty reasonable strategy.
Convergence in its many forms – vastly misunderstood by much of the consumer media – is alive and well, after all, as you know.
In 2000, BCE bought CTV for $2.3 billion and then purchased control of the Globe and Mail, bringing the assets under the umbrella of Bell Globemedia with the Thomson family as minority shareholders. That same year, BCE purchased control of global telecom carrier Teleglobe for what eventually cost a breathtaking $7 billion.
The strategy as Monty saw it then, was that connecting people to the Internet is fine. Providing them phone service is fine, but there has to be more to it, he said. I interviewed him on a couple of occasions back then and he called the strategy: “Connectivity powered by content and commerce.”
One might reverse that today, however, saying content and commerce are powered by connectivity. High-speed connectivity, that is.
Basically, Bell was offering video already through ExpressVu and had a terrestrial backbone for which it needed content to ship to people. So it bought some. Monty wanted to grow the company internationally and provide service beyond Canada’s borders. So it bought it. “We’ll use the Teleglobe network… to allow an Alcan, a Bombardier, a large bank or banks, government to, in effect, reach out to the rest of the world through a Canadian vehicle and for us to bring others to Canada,” he said to me in 2001.
This doesn’t sound all that dissimilar to what Bell Canada announced this week, offering global VOIP service to business clients – telephony around the globe.
Monty also championed something called the ComboBox, a piece of consumer technology that never was launched as planned in 2002. But ComboBox’s all-in-one features – digital satellite receiver, personal video recorder (80-Gig), high speed Internet web surfing, chat, instant messaging and e-mail to the television set – have all been tried by cable in various box incarnations – as well as satellite and other providers. In fact, most of those features are today available to MTS TV and Sasktel TV customers.
Monty’s mistake, then, was not really in his overall vision (which in hindsight needed tweaking, but didn’t yours in 2001?), but in his execution. The thinking – providing original content, global voice – was out-of-the-box, especially for a telco executive. The execution – buying everything in sight – was from way down deep in the old-school dustbin. Content can be rented, global voice can be provided without buying a telephone company – even back in 2000-01-02
While the BGM division has performed admirably, thanks largely to the CTV ratings juggernaut, the Teleglobe purchase was too much for the market to bear and Monty fell/was pushed onto his sword in April 2002.
Teleglobe was sold off shortly thereafter but BCE continues to hold BGM, partly because it can’t get the price it wants, partly because it’s not exactly sure it wants to sell it after all.
“Ongoing access to elements of the content that exist today at Bell Globemedia is something we believe is important,” said current BCE CEO Michael Sabia last month. “(That content) is important to what people will be doing and how they will be communicating in the next while. It’s a helpful addition to the overall quality of the information and entertainment services we will be delivering… We believe that (Bell Globemedia) does have some role to play in the future of our business.”
Hmmmm. Compare that to back in 2001, when Monty told me: “I use the term experience and destination because that’s really the best way to give the image of what the Internet is to the customer… if that’s the case, we must bring a destination and experience, not just a connection."
I don’t have any quarrel with the fact Monty lost his job in 2002. That’s the life of the public company CEO: Your stock doesn’t perform, or you make one colossal boo-boo – you’re gone (unless of course you own control, that is…).
I just think that it’s unfair to point to Monty as a failed executive with a failed vision.
He had some ideas that were not as bad as they’ve been made out to be.
– Greg O’Brien
