I’ve got the flu. Sick all weekend. I’ll spare you the details. Praise be to paracetamol!
Nonetheless, the brain keeps ticking over sporadically. (Unfortunately, the guts churn over sporadicaly, too.) So here’s a therapeutic kicking of a common telco piece of received wisdom. I know I’ll feel better afterwards.
“Fast follower”.
On average, it’s rubbish.
I’ve heard it over and over again. “We’re fast followers.” Gee, well I guess they were too.
The problem is a narrowness of framing. Telcos still think in terms of competition with other telcos, particularly on the wireless side. The assumption remains that a service only pops up on the network once it’s been given the telco blessing and launched. OK, you allow a bit of innovation at the fringes a-la i-mode and a thousand download portals. If a particular service becomes popular, you can always buy in a version of it. Picture messaging becomes fashionable? One picture messaging product, hold the fries please!
Not!
What it ignores is that the competition is aggregating huge, integrated hubs. The Myspaces and Flickrs of the world are sucked up into even bigger mega-hubs of Yahoo! and Newscorp. They don’t do termination fees, obscure interconnect agreements, and state-by-state regulatory negotiation. They actually understand their customers, because they focus on doing a few things well. You’re going to have to negotiate with them instead, and it won’t be comfortable. They know time is on their side.
The alternatives? Plenty. For example, “integrate, participate or cultivate”. Integrate is a product-centric strategy. Build your own hub where the products are truly integrated, and voice and messaging sit at the heart. The whole more than the sum of parts. Participate is a redefinition of the business model. Shred it into wee bits, stick (billable) APIs into your app and biz platforms, and see what other people find useful in picking over the telco carcass. You never know, they might find something useful. Cultivate is a customer intimacy play. Grow a closer relationship with some sub-segments. Re-org yourself to be less monolithic. Who’s scared of being a dumb pipe when the capacity is being bought by some other more customer-centric part of your own business?
But “our competitive advantage is we like being second”? Commercial suicide, I say.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 03:18 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/680.
It's only matched in stupidity by the poisonous delusion of "first-mover advantage"...
Posted by: at March 14, 2006 03:12 PM