According to Mike Elgan at Computerworld, one of the benefits of the iPhone might be that it will make US consumers aware that their cell phones in fact ARE locked.
Locked cell phones, and phones that are otherwise crippled, is something that folks from outside of the US would never put up with. We were living in Milan last Spring, and we needed to live in Valencia for 6 weeks. I just took the Telecom Italia SIM card out of my Nokia GSM phone, and put in a different one from a Spanish cell phone company. It took me all of 4 minutes and cost me all of 5 Euro, and the new SIM card came with 10 Euro worth of minutes anyway.
In the US, your cell phone and your cell phone service come strictly bundled. This raises switching costs which therefore keeps prices high for service.
The FCC is running an auction in late January 2008 for the spectrum vacated by TV channels 52-69, known as the 700 MHz spectrum. As part of the conversion to digital TV, by law this spectrum reverts to the FCC on 17 Feb 2009. The FCC is proposing that part of this spectrum be reserved for an open network, i. e. Internet-like, where any device or hardware can use it. So how did Verizon react to this exciting news? They sued the FCC (They have since decided to drop the suit).
It will be interesting to see whether the 700 MHz auction will enable someone (Google?) to free US mobile users from their locked cells. In the meantime, E' meglio essere in Italia (It's better to be in Italy).
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Electronic Misnomers
I really hate the phrases "electronic marketing", "electronic business", "electronic commerce", or its derivative, "e-commerce". The word electronic focuses on hardware, which, at this point at least, tends to be electronic. This obscures the fact that the raw material of Internet business is software. Companies do not use electronics to create so called "electronic services", they use software to do so.
The defining characteristic of software is, of course, its softness. In other words, the most useful thing about software is its sheer arbitrariness. One can do anything one wants to do with it. This utter flexibility is itself quite challenging. At the design end, complexity forces programmers to build code so that it functions well within the Internet software ecology. At the user end, complexity impacts the consumer also, since that customer needs some sort of mental model or metaphor to understand how the e-service functions.
Software is becoming more and more ubiquitous in the consumer's environment. More and more, marketing is becoming a process of managing software. Marketers need to think about its design or acquisition, adoption, assimilation and implementation, all in way that furthers the firm's marketing goals.
Marketing departments need to absorb the fact that the physical, psychological, social and commercial worlds are increasingly constructed with software. It is not an e-world, it's an s-world.
Related Paper: Hofacker, Charles F., Ronald E. Goldsmith, Eileen Bridges and Esther Swilley (2007), "E-Services: A Synthesis and Research Agenda," Journal of Value Chain Management.
The defining characteristic of software is, of course, its softness. In other words, the most useful thing about software is its sheer arbitrariness. One can do anything one wants to do with it. This utter flexibility is itself quite challenging. At the design end, complexity forces programmers to build code so that it functions well within the Internet software ecology. At the user end, complexity impacts the consumer also, since that customer needs some sort of mental model or metaphor to understand how the e-service functions.
Software is becoming more and more ubiquitous in the consumer's environment. More and more, marketing is becoming a process of managing software. Marketers need to think about its design or acquisition, adoption, assimilation and implementation, all in way that furthers the firm's marketing goals.
Marketing departments need to absorb the fact that the physical, psychological, social and commercial worlds are increasingly constructed with software. It is not an e-world, it's an s-world.
Related Paper: Hofacker, Charles F., Ronald E. Goldsmith, Eileen Bridges and Esther Swilley (2007), "E-Services: A Synthesis and Research Agenda," Journal of Value Chain Management.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Tabula Rasa
Ah, a new blog! It feels like being a kid with a clean, blank piece of lined (college rule) paper, a sharp pencil, on a rainy Fall Saturday. All that blank space on the page, I mean what is my blogger.com disk space limit? I could write all day every day for the rest of my life and still not fill it up I bet. Unless of course I upload some movies, but that is not the point. The point is the pure flexible potential of it all; gigabytes of potential. Terabytes of it. And that is the potential of the Internet, isn't it? All that cheap disk space, all live, accessible online. What is the price of a gig per year these days? A buck? A quarter? I bet when I was in college, there wasn't a whole gigabyte on the island of Manhattan. Now, so much space just waiting for an inspired user to hit the save button and thereby make a brilliant contribution available to the whole world.
The pre-2001 crash Internet was pure potential, with everybody trying to figure out how to monetize those eyeballs wandering across the bits and bytes stored on all that cheap disk space. Sell banners! Of course, that is how you do it. By how much did all those newly networked disk drives add to the world's inventory of advertising space? Oh what a sudden glut of space.
OK, so my blog or your blog isn't going to earn anybody a ton of money, but the potential is great, right? I just have to figure out what to say.
The pre-2001 crash Internet was pure potential, with everybody trying to figure out how to monetize those eyeballs wandering across the bits and bytes stored on all that cheap disk space. Sell banners! Of course, that is how you do it. By how much did all those newly networked disk drives add to the world's inventory of advertising space? Oh what a sudden glut of space.
OK, so my blog or your blog isn't going to earn anybody a ton of money, but the potential is great, right? I just have to figure out what to say.
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