Congratulations on your new role leading Sprint Nextel. The skills you brought to a smooth debut of Embarq onto the public scene will be a great asset in smoothing the investor waters for Sprint Nextel. I’m sure you and the Board of Directors will place a high priority on that, given the beating the stock has taken in the last 18 months.

But what excites me about Sprint’s potential isn’t fixing up the customer services issues from the merger, as much as it needs to be done. It’s your plan for the first fourth-generation wireless broadband network in the U.S. (Point of order: Canada gets the nod for the first North American 4G network.) It’s not so much that it’s being done with WiMAX – I’d be just as enthused if it were going to be made from peanut butter and rubber bands, although I doubt you’d be getting so much support from Intel, Motorola, and the WiMAX Forum. The real vision in the Sprint 4G plan comes from the intended business model.

Yankee Group’s research shows that Anywhere Consumers want to take their experiences with them wherever they go. But that doesn’t mean we want to jam all of them into our mobile phones. We have lots of other portable items that can share the mobile experience load: laptops, cameras, game devices, even (my personal favorite) umbrellas. As the size and cost of connectivity at the edge of the network both continue to shrink, items using it will only increase.

To make all those work, we need a network operator that won’t ask us to sign up for per-device service contracts. Instead, we need one relationship with the wireless network that embraces, simply, all the devices we might want to benefit from the network’s services and capacity. That’s the way to stimulate consumer adoption of the mobile internet. And that’s what I like so much about Sprint’s plans so far.

While Verizon’s getting that vaunted testing lab up and running, I say keep the pressure on your 4G team to get its first installations up in 2008. Given your prior success simplifying rate offers at AT&T Wireless, you have a great opportunity to perfect the 4G business model and show those red guys how it’s done.

Good luck!

A personal triumph! I finally finished a challenging, irritating but useful book about forecasting the future. I took on Nassim Taleb’s daunting The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2007) because it seemed like something technology prognosticators ought to understand.

A ‘black swan’, in Taleb’s terminology, is an essentially unpredictable event: the events of 9/11, the rise of Google. It has three qualities: unpredictability, massive consequences, and, most interestingly, ‘retrospective explainability’ — as in, “Well, of course search would be the most important way to dive into the Internet, and of course Google’s approach was better than anyone else’s.”

I’ve spent over ten years building and using forecasts, and answering sometimes hostile questions about them. As I’d suspected from the jacket cover, The Black Swan was an education on how the other side thinks, dripping with attitude: Taleb reviles how humans, including professional futurists, attempt to predict what’s ahead but fall woefully short.

I value having read the book; it offers cogent lessons. One such: You cannot manipulate more information than your past can deliver. Example: a turkey being raised for Thanksgiving will never anticipate — based on his daily feeding — that his end will come quite suddenly. In this case his past has negative value in anticipating his future. Another: Beware the reification of your spreadsheets. Just because a figure appears automatically in a cell doesn’t make it correct.

In the end, though, I asked myself: is it wrong to try to anticipate technology’s future impact on our world? For that’s what I and my technology analyst colleagues do. Here’s where I came out, simply stated:

• We should not stop asking ourselves what’s next — for one thing, it’s too much fun
• While the past is insufficient support, and potentially misleading, it’s still a valid input to that effort
• Pending near-term events, parallel episodes in other domains, and, yes, guesswork also play a part
• If you’re right more often than you’re wrong, you add value

Did you read the book? Share your reactions in the context of anticipating technology’s evolution.

“I’ve thrown many a Philippe Starck alarm clock at the wall,” admitted Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo Inc. We were at the MITX Fireside Chat event, where Tim talked about the role of design across a spectrum of applications. He was commenting on how things that look good are rarely as functional as they should be.

I asked about his impressions of design success, failure, and opportunities in connectivity products for the consumer. He agreed that there are looming opportunities to meet the appetite of emerging Anywhere Consumers to have their experiences with them wherever they go, in the form of newly-conceived products and services that move us beyond the now-iconic iPod. “[But] the consumer electronics industry has been frustratingly slow to realize that it’s a systems problem, not a device problem. We don’t need better objects — we need entire processes that are better. Why don’t they understand that when the consumer is left to figure out how things go together, it doesn’t work? Too much of the important part of the consumer experience falls into a black hole. Meanwhile, clearly we are overwhelming people with too many potential solutions.”

He’s right, of course: Microsoft’s re-tooled Zune does what Microsoft can always do — iterate steadily over the prior effort — but doesn’t yet unlock the next Anywhere music experience.

Tim points to part of the cause: the bell-curve addiction. “When I look at consumer market research, I don’t care about statistical significance. I am looking for the outliers at both ends of the bell curve. That’s where design inspiration comes from.”

If that’s true, unlocking the Anywhere Consumer’s latent demand for more portability in information, entertainment, and transactions could come from understanding both how extreme users behave and what’s holding back the non-users.