Who will be the Dell of the network service providers?

The Union Square Ventures blog discusses the possible winners and losers amongst the big network service providers

For those of us who have been around for a while, the rumblings of the telcos about moving up into the applications space, or the cable companies moving more aggressively into content, or the wireless operators focus on value added “on deck” services all start to look familiar. None of these players seem to embrace the decentralized innovation that created the PC and the Internet. None seem to be using their substantial R&D capabilities and access to capital to build the best price performance connectivity. None seem to be innovating at the process level. They all seem obsessed with innovating at the architectural level, creating supersets of the open standards that created the web, and reaching up into the applications layer to create high margin vertically integrated “value added” solutions.

No definitive answers, but thought provoking for those in the Telco sector.