Q1 hurts

Some serious blog congestion ahead this week as I deal with a slew of earnings releases in Europe. Last Friday I had a meeting with a new client, and when asked about my recommendations for the telecom sector, I said "buy oil and mining." Two days into results season, I might consider adding some other completely unrelated sector. Tele2 missed expectations yesterday, and got a serious kicking from the market, which continues today. Today TeliaSonera has delivered an EBITDA number below the bottom of the consensus range, and the stock is currently down 5.4%. Tomorrow Telenor, Thursday France Telecom...

I also noted with interest some extraordinarily frank comments from Rupert Murdoch in today's Financial Times (page 13 of the UK edition), in which he confesses to "quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would simply go away," and describing himself as "searching for answers to an emerging medium that is not my native language." You can really tell that Sky is in its fiscal Q4, because they seem to be pulling out all the stops in the marketing arena - last week I even saw an independent sales agent with a display set up outside a shopping mall in Camberwell, South London, touting for business on the street like a charity fundraiser.

UPDATE - If it's any consolation to Mr. Murdoch, I think we're all pretty much in the same boat. Consider trying to define these two fabulous "digital revolution" examples in terms of the traditional media landscape (both via the always outstanding Near Near Future). Are they games, musical/art works, trivia hunts, cartography projects? They sure ain't television. Then again, a decade ago, what would we have made of notions like "continuous partial attention," MMOG, blogging, Skype Mega Chat, reality TV or any of the other staples of our daily lives?