Given today’s news of leadership turmoil at my alma mater of Sprint, I thought I’d throw in my part-nickel:
1. The product. Sprint lost the plot with the handsets and the core voice product. Early innovation attempts like voice command didn’t get mass adoption, but rather than iterate and learn, Sprint abandoned product innovation (except for media entertainment, which users didn’t care about much because they were too busy buying iPods instead). If you’re going to have a non-GSM network, you need to be bringing in the coolest Japanese and Korean techno-gear, pronto. Sprint should have been the one to introduce visual voicemail, not Apple. It forgot that PCS was supposed to mean “Personal Communications System”.
2. The positioning. Disastrous down-market forays into the credit-challenged to boost subscriber numbers. Part of a deeper malaise of management by numbers rather than by having a core belief and purpose. Brand became battered, the “clarity” pin drop message lost.
3. The paperwork. Back office IT disasters, most notably trying to swap billing systems at the same time as the CDMA 1xRTT roll-out. Outsourcing to IBM didn’t solve the problem, just added a layer of insulation around the bad smell.
4. The pipe. Can you hear me now? Nope.
5. The people. Being in the Midwest cuts you off from the main tech centres. OK for the customer support, not OK for product development.
6. The policies. There were cultural issues that meant doing the right thing for the customer wasn’t rewarded. Tied to the management-by-numbers problem, where many of the things that matter can’t easily be measured.
7. The platform. One valiant attempt and failure at building an open platform at PCS. Then the casual desecration of Nextel’s developer community. Now you’re cut off from grassroots innovation.
8. The partners. If you’re #3 or below, and don’t want to be the price leader, you need to build a partner ecosystem. Sprint wasn’t quick enough to become the destination of choice for every portal and social networking player. Better to have given away the data services and kept up the margins and retention on voice.
9. The plan. Separate divisions, “One Sprint”, goodbye Local, hello Nextel. The Grand Old Duke of York, he marched them… you get the idea.
10. The project. WiMax appears to be stuck with ye olde telecoms model of offering an ISP plan and trying to gather premium profits through having a network that can’t be replicated because nobody else can find the spectrum or towers. Should have built it as part of a larger risk-sharing consortium with the cablecos, and focused on B2B/wholesale products on top of it, and made the money from offering IT services — just like BT is doing. Networks are capex liabilities, not assets. Actually, it probably shouldn’t have been built at all — wrong spectrum for doing a next-gen PCS product. 700Mhz is where it’s at, goes through walls…
Apart from that, everything is fine!
UPDATE: I’m going to refine #5 in case it’s misunderstood — it’s the people outside rather than inside — there’s no lack of technical, business or management talent inside of Sprint, just the company is rather isolated in Kansas City where there just aren’t other big tech (or even Fortune 500) companies around to share germs with, let along start-ups. If anything, it the hard working and honest culture of Sprint’s employees that’s kept it afloat.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 08:13 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/881.
And Sprint HQ really isn't even in Kansas City, it's a long drive away in Overland Park .. like you say, hard working, honest people. Often there's more spark to be found in their Reston or W Coast locations, though.
Posted by: at October 10, 2007 03:38 AM