For all the talk about openness and expansive aspirations in their respective businesses, carriers sure have an odd way of showing it.

I’ve been covering the wireless industry long enough to remember when the CEOs from the nation’s largest carriers would appear together on the same stage at the big annual (and sometimes bi-annual) conference. Competition was as fierce then as it is today, but executives must be too thin skinned now because they are unwilling to go head-to-head in a public forum.

U.S. operators are among the largest companies in the world. They serve hundreds of millions of customers and the nation’s four nationwide carriers represent a combined market cap of $615 billion. Sure, that’s a far cry from the combined $4.5 trillion market value of technology leaders Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, but those companies would not be in the position they are today without the hundreds of billions of dollars that the telecom operators spent on their networks.

Leaders at these companies certainly have a lot to talk about — industry observers, customers, and the businesses they serve deserve to hear from them. It’s a busy, confusing, transitional time for the industry and there are plenty of insufficiently answered questions about 5G. Who’s going to pay for it? Why should customers care? How will it impact privacy and security?

High-ranking executives at the nation’s top carriers were in attendance at the recent MWC Los Angeles 2019. Some gave keynote presentations on the main stage, but the dynamics of a back-and-forth conversation among top executives was sorely missed. The closest we got was a series of short but separate sit-down interviews that Chris Nicoll, principal analyst at ACG Research, led with CTOs at AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile US, and Verizon.

U.S. Cellular CEO Kenneth Meyers was the highest-ranking telco executive on the main stage. Tami Erwin, EVP and group CEO at Verizon Business, shared the operator’s vision for 5G during her keynote. And Sprint CEO Michel Combes apparently skipped out on his scheduled keynote at the last minute because he wasn’t able to make it to Los Angeles for the show, according to a company spokesperson.

With all due respect to the operator CTOs, Meyers, and Erwin, it just wasn’t a who’s who of U.S. wireless’ executives. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg, and T-Mobile US CEO John Legere might have been holding backroom meetings at the show, but they didn’t make their presence known.

The industry’s largest annual gathering stateside would have been an ideal backdrop for the four carriers to announce their joint venture to finally bring Rich Communications Service (RCS), an interoperable messaging standard that’s been under development for more than a decade, to the masses. Instead, the news was relegated to a news release that was issued as MWC Los Angeles 2019 came to a close.

That tepid rollout tracks with my immediate reaction to the news. Carriers don’t have a good track record on joint initiatives. Nine years ago nearly to the month, the same companies announced a mobile payment joint venture that was originally called Isis — I kid you not — before being rebranded for obvious reasons as Softcard almost four years later.

That mobile payment venture launched nationwide in 2013, but it never took off and Google acquired the intellectual property in 2015 to integrate it into its mobile payment platform. Eventually all four operators acquiesced and backed Google Wallet, which became Android Pay and is now the clunkier titled Google Pay Send.

History could be repeating itself again. Google is a huge proponent of RCS and it already provides the service to Sprint and some global operators. AT&T, T-Mobile US, and Verizon use Mavenir’s platform for RCS.

RCS, which is designed to replace boring old text messages or short message service (SMS), has been a long time coming. I wrote my first of a few articles about the technology way before my hair started going gray. It still hasn’t arrived and I doubt it will ever become the standard mode of messaging that operators envision.

I may be proven wrong, but consider how many other messaging apps and platforms have taken hold while operators have been spinning their wheels lamenting the loss of the cash cow that SMS once was. Apple’s iMessage, Facebook’s WhatsApp and Messenger, and WeChat are each used by more than a billion people.

Wireless customers are fickle and there’s nothing sticky about RCS that they don’t already enjoy with these alternatives. It’s a huge addressable market that carriers have been unable to execute and people have already moved on to other ubiquitous platforms.

“The wireless carriers have historically had a poor record of monetizing anything but their core service, which leads us to the question: Will this be different? One can only hope so, because it’s their last chance,” said Roger Entner, founder and lead analyst at Recon Analytics.

“It’s their last chance for some advertising revenue and it’s their last chance to monetize messaging,” he said. Person-to-person (P2P) messaging is “dead” as a business opportunity for operators, but application-to-person (A2P) messaging still has some legs to it, Entner explained.

RCS can power effective marketing campaigns, but “carriers have not been very good in selling this,” Entner said. How many times have we heard carriers talk about contextual, location-aware mobile coupons? When’s the last time you received a coupon for a nearby coffee shop, a cafe you frequent, or a hot new watering hole? It’s rare and wireless operators play a miniscule role when those come through today.

RCS is designed for ubiquity and interoperability across any device and network but adoption and support is still scant. The nationwide carriers say RCS will start supporting Android devices in 2020. No mention of iPhones though, which comprise about 45% of the U.S. smartphone market.

Apple will probably come around if RCS is adopted on a global basis as the replacement for SMS, however it won’t replace the wildly popular iMessage service as the default messaging app between iOS users. One thing is certain: if iOS isn’t on board, RCS will be dead on arrival.

Mobile used to be a carrier-centric universe but “now that we’re in a much more handset-centric world the number of cats that need to be herded is a lot larger,” Entner said.

“Because Google is such a big RCS player and a big advertising player, give it a year or two and maybe the others are throwing in the towel and are transferring it over to Google,” he said. “That’s the worst case scenario [and] that’s why Google is so strongly behind RCS because it’s a natural extension of their core advertising platform.”

If the nation’s largest operators have an answer to these problems and a better story to tell about RCS and their Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative, they should have talked about it together on stage at MWC Los Angeles 2019. They’ll get another chance at MWC Barcelona 2020 in February, but I’m not holding my breath.