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Family Plans are Best – For Shareholders

By on February 13, 2012 in rant, Telecom

Remember when carriers charged for what you used?

Both Verizon and AT&T are expected to announce shared data plans shortly. Heralded as a boon for consumers, careful thought reveals it is more of a boondoggle. Shared use plans allow you to buy a block of data and then use that block across all of your devices. What’s wrong with that, right?

Shared or family plans are based upon the business model of forcing you to purchase a data plan that is way too big, and then having to use up the super-sized block by sharing it with all of your other devices. The benefit for the carriers is that you get locked into a single carrier. Continue Reading →

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Contempt for Customers

By on January 25, 2012 in rant, Telecom

Thinly disguised contempt for the customer is an easy trap to fall into, after-all, without customers our jobs would be a lot easier. There is just one problem with this line of thinking…

The first time I heard the term Thinly Disguised Contempt for the Customer was from the book In Search of Excellence. The example provided was overhearing a flight attendant refering to boarding passengers as “Here comes the Animal.”  Thinly disguised contempt, in unchecked, grows – and can destroy any lingering notion of quality customer service.

Unfortunately, telecommunications and airlines are the stereotypical worst at passive aggressive thinly disguised contempt toward customers.

For telecom, the best example was the Ernestine character by Lily Tomlin- a regular on Laugh-in.  Earnestine was a nosey, condescending telephone operator. Famous quotes include:

  • “Here at the Phone Company, we serve all kinds of people; from President’s and Kings to the scum of the earth…”
  • “Next time you complain about your phone service, why don’t you try using two Dixie cups with a string. We don’t care. We don’t have to. (snort) We’re the Phone Company!”

Ernestine worked back in the days when Ma Bell was a monopoly, but the breakup of Ma-bell only spread the contemptuous practice to all kinds of telecom firms – carriers, equipment makers, cellular providers, web services, etc. The monopoly is gone, but telecom firms still hide their customer appreciation behind long term contracts and “your call is important to us”  recordings. Continue Reading →

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The Unspoken Question

By on January 17, 2012 in rant, Telecom

What exactly should the mute button do?

Daniel J. Wakin, reporting for the NYT:

The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept on going, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor.

Actually, Patron X said he had no idea he was the culprit. He said his company replaced his BlackBerry with an iPhone the day before the concert. He said he made sure to turn it off before the concert, not realizing that the alarm clock had accidentally been set and would sound even if the phone was in silent mode.

“I didn’t even know phones came with alarms,” the man said.

This opens two proverbial cans of worms. The first topic is should the mute function, which clearly silences the ringer also silence the alarm? The second topic is “mute” even the right word.

The Mute Function:

It really boils down to user expectations and how to keep things simple or intuitive. We’ve all been told to silence our phones at various performances, and we generally turn down the volume or hit a mute option. Now be honest – if you mute or silence the phone, do you expect it to silence a set alarm?  (Topic originally spotted at Daring Fireball). Continue Reading →

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Digital Realities

By on November 7, 2011 in rant, Telecom

When technology shifts occur slowly, dramatic changes in how we live take place. Electricity allowed us to work late at night as opposed to until sundown. But when technology changes are more rapid – we tend to force it to adapt to our defined norms – baby steps.

[eventually this post will get to the Protect IP Act]

SIP trunks are a great example. I’ve worked with some carriers that allow multiple SIP calls over a single trunk. They charge per minute instead per trunk. However, this confuses administrators. A trunk has always represented a single call path. The easy solution is to force the SIP trunks to behave “normally.” This means to keep things simple, if we want to support 5 concurrent calls, simply set up 5 trunks and 5 sets of credentials instead of one. ???

Adapting new technology to the old framework, is very common, and often necessary for us to get our minds around it. The Kindle and Nook allow an ebook owner to lend a book to someone else for 2 weeks. But during the loan, the owner no longer has access to the book. Why? This made perfect sense with physical books, but what is the logic in erasing the owner’s content during the loan period? It simply doesn’t make sense in the digital era to break the technology.

Sometimes, we find new technology threatening – and run from it or kill it before realizing its true power. Sonic Blue was an early DVR company that figured out how to analyze recordings to detect commercials. It promised its customers the ability to accurately skip commercials with a single touch of the remote. The company is gone – GE, then owner of NBC, litigated the company to death. GE saw a major threat to its revenue. Fast forward to the present and online video content providers like Hulu use the DVR concept with reverse logic – you can skip the show, but not the commericals. If Sonic Blue were around today, it could be booming with a revenue model that the broadcasters would love. Think of how many consumers would accept a free DVR in lieu of not being able to skip commericals. They could record their favorite shows and watch them later, for free. If only we had decent commercial detection technology.

Speaking of digital recordings, the recording industries are having a tough time with digital content. The past decade made it fairly easy to both create and copy high quality content with common inexpensive tools. Bands can create their demo cuts on a home PC instead of an expensive recording studio. I generally now prefer to watch movies in my home theater than a real theater. Industry revenues are dwindling, and it is creating all kinds of panic and havoc.

Continue Reading →

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Happy Independence Day

By on October 28, 2011 in Random, rant

This is a follow-up post from last Summer’s proclamation that Halloween and Independence Day should be swapped.

See: Have a Scarey Fourth of July

In that post, I made some compelling, dare I say brilliant, reasonings why these holidays should be flipped. Rather than repeat myself here, I will just offer you all a happy Independence Day. Unfortuantely, I forgot to buy/save fireworks even though they are safer now.

October was a very important month in 1776:

12th - British Brigade begins guarding Throgg Necks Road in Bronx
18th - Battle of Pelham: Col John Glover & Marblehead regiment meet British Forces in Bronx
26th - Benjamin Franklin departed from America for France on a mission to seek French support for the American Revolution.
28th - Battle of White Plains; Washington retreats to NJ

Not to mention:

The Battle of Valcour Island 11 October 1776

October 11th is the anniversary of the most important naval battle of the American Revolution. It was fought on a fresh-water lake (Lake Champlain) by an American force consisting of fifteen small vessels, commanded by an army general, Benedict Arnold, who became America’s most notorious traitor. Opposing it was a larger British flotilla, firing a weight of metal almost twice that of the Americans. Not surprising, therefore, the British destroyed the American fleet and decisively won the battle of Valcour Island.

Why then is it such an important battle? Because to deal with the threat posed by this rag-tag American fleet, the British expended precious time to assemble their own naval force, costing them the opportunity to invade the United States along the route of the Hudson River during the campaign of 1776. After their victory, they retreated to Canada, regrouped, and waited until the next spring to begin driving southward. By then the Americans were better prepared and the invaders were unsupported because the main British army in America had left New York. As a result, the Americans forced the surrender of the invading force at Saratoga, New York. This victory, in turn, convinced France to ally itself with the United States, broadening the American Revolution into an international conflict and stretching British resources to the breaking point. Thus a little-remembered naval battle changed the course of the war and led directly to American victory.

————-

In 1789 (the year the Consititution was ratified) it was Oct 2nd  that George Washington transmitted the proposed Constitutional amendments (The United States Bill of Rights) to the States for ratification. He also declared the first national Thanksgiving to take place in November 1789.

So October is a fine month to celebrate Independence day. 

Credits:

http://www.navalhistory.org/2010/10/11/the-battle-of-valcour-island-11-october-1776/

http://www.historyorb.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I Have Seen The Future and I am Opposed

By on February 16, 2011 in rant, Telecom

Yesterday, I tweeted a link to a thoughtful post with this clever title by Don Norman. It resonated with me on a few different levels and I encourage everyone to read it. First, it starts off at a tech conference with insufficient Internet Wi-Fi. A crime far too frequently committed. Hotels tend to have insufficient bandwidth for their general population of visitors, but tech conferences are a whole different color of a horse. The typical tech attendee is equipped with a Wi-Fi enabled mobile phone, laptop, and now a tablet that connects to networks for IM, email, social, and who knows what else content. Tech conferences need to supersize their Internet. 

But besides that rant, the post makes two key important points. The first being how dependent we are on our devices (or more importantly how utterly useless we are without them), and the second being the increasingly proprietary nature of our once open network.

The first point is important. Just last night, Comcast failed me (again) and I was offline at home without notice for several hours. I was working on a document that lives in Google Docs and could not access it. That was my first priority, good thing I have a list of things to do. Fiddlesticks, I can’t book those travel tickets, nor do some online research. Maybe I should relax and buy a few things I wanted….oh shit.  Deprived of the ability to do my top priorities, I opted to go to bed.

The second issue has to do with interoperability. The post in question looks at this from a consumer point of view, but it’s the same story in business communications, particularly UC. The Internet has transformed our lives thanks to open standards and connectivity. We can email everyone regardless of their platform and we can shop at stores or book tickets regardless of the brand and OS of the host site or the home site. It has transformed the way we work, play, and interact – yet it seems like everybody is working hard to build barriers to this successful model.

Facebook is for Facebook users, Twitter for Twitter users, and so on. Every cool app on my phone is yet another client for another network – another wall. Sharing information between gardens – even my gardens – is getting tougher and tougher. Back to the work environment, the same is true in UC. Skype users can’t talk to Microsoft Live (MSN) or the vast majority of corporate IM networks. Desktop video, collaboration tools, even web-based voice communications get stopped at network borders.

It’s wrong! It’s time to demand interoperability. The app frenzy is a bad thing, stop feeding it. Mr. Norman is a wise man, you heard it here second.

 

http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/i_have_seen_the_future_and_i_am_opposed_18532.asp

Check out my Shared News Items here: https://www.google.com/reader/shared/Davemichels

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It is so Confusing!

By on January 25, 2011 in rant, Telecom

There is a tremendous amount of shuffling going on and I am getting confused. I follow news and industry events pretty closely and understand why it’s all happening, but whoa! back up for a second and this is just nuts! 

The traditional voice folks are competing against email giants Microsoft and IBM, which in turn are competing against search giant Google. Cisco is competing against Dell and HP with servers while building its UC solution around hosted email. All of them have their eye on book reseller Amazon as premise is giving way to cloud which is giving way to virtualized premise. Enterprise IT is buying consumer devices for more power. Phones are becoming PCs and PCs are becoming tablets, and cell phones are becoming TVs, oh and headsets now detect presence. Skype concurrently competes against all of them and none of them. And Apple is kicking all of their butts. 

Here is the best part, it’s all dropping in price. Or is that the worse part?

The thing is, it isn’t just telephony or unified communications. There are few industries out there not going through similar disruption. Retail, healthcare, energy, broadcasting, publishing, transportation, automobiles, advertising  – it’s all up for grabs. The rate of innovation is insane.

Ten years ago doesn’t seem very long ago does it? Consider this: young Starbucks didn’t have wi-fi. Cell phones pretty much just did voice. Microsoft was offering Windows ME. The movie “You’ve Got Mail”, based on dialup AOL email and chat, was contemporary. Palm owned the PDA market and Apple was about to unveil its first (5 GB) iPod. My preferred search engine was Alta Vista. I was on a first name basis with my travel agent.

I understand technology marches on and things change. But this is absolutely insane. In a recent post, I used the phrase “the ever shortening half-life of knowledge”. A half life refers to the period of time it takes for a substance undergoing decay to decrease by half. Our knowledge is decaying fast as there is a new way of doing just about everything. The rate of innovation directly correlates to the rate of obsolescence, and both are pegged in the red zone. 

Continuous learning isn’t a model to strive for, it’s a matter of survival. On-the-job training and education used to be an event – banners and new coffee cups associated with a new release of software or new work flow process. Training was orchestrated, sometimes off-site maybe even involving travel. I remember doing corporate training sessions on a new voice mail system… not anymore. Corporations would be doing nothing but training if that model still existed. Instead we are throwing it out there insisting its intuitive.

Facebook, Twitter, new apps of all kinds, industry shifts, new competitors, new tools, new processes. Sink or swim baby. The training department is only concerned with major initiatives. The good news is various tools for learning are increasing – wiki’s, videos, blogs, YouTube, collaboration software, etc. But you are on your own with it.

Of course, it will be all different tomorrow.

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