I attended the Mobile World Congress in 2012 and what stuck out for me was the total absence of Apple. BlackBerry was there and Google had a massive booth. The telecoms were all promoting their versions of over-the-top messaging, meant to compete with Apple and sustain the declining SMS subscription revenue.

I could appreciate the need for the incumbents to come up with _something_ to counteract the iPhone wave, but it all seemed rather hopeless at the time.

Telecoms shot themselves in the foot by not going full swing on something with great interop and iMessage features. They should have totally dominated video / multi-media messaging etc.

But they all wanted their own proprietary thing, even today. Blackberry came really close to getting major telecoms onboard for adopting BBM as their over the top replacement, but it never closed (iirc they argued about price).

I feel that if telecoms realized what they are, which is infrastructure dumb pipes, things like interoperable standards would be easier for them to adopt. Look at the failure of Verizon trying to diversify, they just shut down BlueJeans (a zoom competitor) and haven't really done much with Yahoo since acquisition.

Telecoms by the mid-2000s had long ago lost their innovation mojo, ceding it to the big tech companies after the deregulation push of the late-1990s and over-leveraging to build out internet networks.