Mike Z. Hired as New Ciena CEO (April Fools')

Imagine my surprise to open the paper this morning (well, my digital paper, that is), to the news that former Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski has been hired by Ciena to be its new CEO. It was right there, next to the news about the AT&T-Verizon merger and Steve Jobs’ official canonization.

It turns out that it wasn’t the relentless mismanagement of Nortel that was the problem. It’s just that peeps don’t buy switches anymore. And Mike Z. knows this better than anyone. Dump the switches, take the helm at Ciena, begin second act. Easy peasy.

I am, of course, joking, in that April Foolsian tradition that we all know and occasionally fall for. But seriously folks, I’ve been thinking a lot about an issue in the telecom industry: branding.

It might be inconceivable to imagine Mike Z. getting hired to helm any company, even if it’s the local doughnut shop in whatever Canadian town he happens to live in. But if conventional wisdom as to what happened at Nortel could be turned — it wasn’t him, it was the decline of the switch business, for example, then all bets are off. There is an object lesson in this hypothetical.

Consider, for instance, that switches and routers don’t matter, from a customer perception standpoint. Seriously. Consider Cisco’s big “I’m gonna change the Internet forever, ma!” announcement that had us all a-quiver with excitement. Excitement that was promptly snuffed out by the impossibly dull conference call announcing the change agent: a big router. Oh. Gee. Yawn. I wasn’t even sure if the AT&T guy on the Web cast was actually awake for most of the event. Point is, we don’t care how the Internet is able to enable the ability to download the entirety of the Library of Congress in four seconds, etc. We just care that it does. Let’s not talk about the router, shall we, other than the fact that it exists.

Or take AT&T and the iPhone issue: if Verizon, as is rumored, gets the iPhone, mass opinion regarding the inability of AT&T to adequately support the device from a network perspective is widely seen as something that will send droves of users into the waiting arms of Verizon. Never mind the fact that CDMA is less spectrally efficient, more difficult to manage, inherently less open to applications: in short, there’s no guarantee that the Verizon experience will be any better. It probably won’t be. It will probably be about the same. But AT&T has done a relatively shoddy job at branding itself the global, capable player that it is, Luke Wilson notwithstanding. Luke Wilson? Really?

Or take, for instance, the perception that Verizon is more consumer-friendly than the rest, thanks to its recent embrace of Skype. Automatically pushing the application to Blackberries, as it began to do last week, and making it available on Android devices etc., has many people giddy, breathlessly heralding the daring leap into new business models that this represents. What people don’t realize, of course, is that the Skype that Verizon is endorsing is a circuit-switched version of the application, not VoIP. The carrier is unlikely to see much cannibalization of voice traffic other than on the international front, where the traffic hits a Skype gateway and gets converted to IP. Otherwise it’s on-net. It’s a brilliant piece of differentiating branding.

My point is that reality is reality, but the message is the medium. Telecom is more complex than it ever has been; it’s an industry that touches every single person on the planet, except maybe those living isolated lives off the grid in the remote reaches of the planet. It’s a tough business. But the level of savvy in positioning and branding products and services can certainly grease the wheels of customer acquisition a bit, which makes life a little less tough. It’s a nut the industry needs to crack before the ultra-broadband era truly takes hold, or risk sending nothing but muddled messages about a new connected life, ruminating on talking fridges and the like, while offering very little clarity to the market. It will be a mess.

P.S. Did you know that Sprint is getting into the crumpet business? I heard that today. It’s so...diverse!*

*April Fools, ya’ll. Of course.