This is from my fireside chat with Glenn and Steve last year. Both are coming back to provide their insights on how things have evolved and where are they going.
Fireside – Mobile Operators: Succeeding on the 4th Curve 
Steve Elfman, President, Sprint
Glenn Lurie, President, AT&T Wireless
Chetan Sharma, President, Chetan Sharma Consulting
Steve and Glenn play a very important role at their respective organizations especially looking at the new revenue opportunities. As our Operator’s Dilemma paper discussed, operators need to invest in new areas of revenue that will help them grow in the next decade. AT&T has done really well with its Emerging Devices and Enterprises organization under Glenn (it is already a billion dollar business). Sprint has the New Ventures group investing in such opportunities as well. It is early in the S-curve but the growth is happening. Just like mobile data grew from nothing to now going to 50%, the 4th curve will be game-changing in due-course. The areas of investment to growth are: Digital Life, Home Security, M2M, Automotive, Analytics, Health, Commerce and Advertising. It is forcing operators to view and organize themselves differently – like software and internet service provider rather than a traditional telco and work with larger ecosystem of VCs, startups, and other partners. One of the key success factors has been the independence of the new group from their parent and the flexibility to execute and move as fast as the nimble startups. Both Glenn and Steve were both quite bullish on windows 8 (especially tablet) and Microsoft’s ability to deliver a 3rd viable ecosystem. Once developers embrace the platform, we will see the signs of success. As we are launching new services and devices, the industry needs to keep an eye on “user experience†else we might scare off consumers. We need to integrate experiences e.g. commerce and advertising, health and wellness, security and monitoring, etc. There are significant opportunities (cloud, security, application suite) in the enterprise and that’s where Microsoft might have an edge.