John Linton .....just as it was only a few days ago that we were all saying "what happened to 2008?"
Christmas is already forgotten and New Year's day in Auckland is an almost faded memory as the demands of making the first of many changes to Exetel's operations more than took up the time available for them over the past nine days. I see that the first of the 'ISP gone in to administration' media reports has occurred (admittedly a very tiny and irrelevent one) and the Telstra CEO flew with his "top executives" to Las Vegas to continue to plot how to overthrow the Australian Government to be able to continue to rape and loot all Australian communications users in perpetuity.
Maybe it's just my peculiar sense of humour in thinking how appropriate it is that a temporary resident CEO of Telstra should consider Las Vegas the appropriate place for the Telstra decision makers to fritter away some their exhorbitant 2008 bonuses they received by gouging exhorbitant charges from struggling Australian residential and corporate customers.
The busy week 'back at work' had some encouraging highlights including:
The 1,000th HSPA customer
Very strong ADSL2 growth
'Live' implementation of our fully automated personnel management system
Progress in our search for the 'perfect HSPA router' (from an unusual source)
New 'indicative' pricing for two key elements of our main costs when contracts are renewed
The completion of the 'test' phase of moving 500 ADSL1 users to ADSL2 with almost no problems (and all but 8 of the 500+ customers not realising there had been a change until they saw their speeds significantly increase)
.........and many smaller but nevertheless significant aspects of our increasingly complex business - mainly in terms of 'tweaking' (some less than kind people might say "completing") a number of different new and old automation processes.
And so it's Saturday morning and while the global economic news I've just finished reading is as negative as ever with more bad things hapening almost everywhere I actually feel more confident about what can be achieved in 2009 that I did at any time over the past few months. Strange how that happens some time. There's never any real basis for how differently things appear to be at different times - at least not in my experience - but sometimes you 'can feel the Force' and believe you can actually make things happen the way you want them to happen.....and it's far too early in the day for that to be the result of chemical changes wrought on your body and mind by the contents of bottles from Scotland.
I still have major concerns about what will happen to Australians when the effects of the problems in the major countries around the world finally have whatever effect they are going to have on the Australian economy. However, and possibly quite wrongly, I am prepared to concede for the first time that the 'classic' commercial analyses might work in Exetel's favour should the financial situation deteriorate further (that in 'bad' financial times the lowest cost 'producer' does better than in 'good' times).
I'm not, or at least I don't think so, basing this quite dramatic change of view on the recent upsurge of interest (denoted by the doubling of "sales enquiries" we have received over the past week) but more by what I hear from some our suppliers about what they see is happening with their businesses and the 'quality' of enquiries we are now receiving from medium and large companies wich would be unusual in any early January period and especially unsual in this one. It seems to me that there are far more company decision makers than I have ever seen in the past looking to reduce their IT and communications costs both in terms of their own systems and the services they make avaialble to their employees.
Of course, a few enquireis, irrespective of their 'quality', don't translate to immediate business gains but I am very much getting the feeling that Exetel has passed some unseen 'mile stone' and is now, for the first time, being considered as a suitable supplier for companies who would never have considered us before. I may well be wrong but sometimes 'the Force' does manifest itself in 'concrete' ways.
So I'm going to take my visiting sister out to lunch and then take her to the airport and forget about Exetel for a few hours on the assumption that it can look after itself for a while.