John Linton It may well just be my inability to have grasped the essential realities of the Australian communications industry over the past ten or so years but it seems to me that everything that I thought I knew about is changing, or has already changed, and is now rapidly becoming beyond my ability to understand. Now that may sound pointlessly over stated, perhaps even 'dramatic', but it is what I currently think. It depends on your own personal perspectives as to how you personally deal with the things you come across in your daily life but I think that the overwhelming majority of rational human beings (or perhaps more correctly, human beings who believe themselves to be rational) use their past experiences and accumulated knowedge to deal with 'things' that crop up in their daily lives.
My fairly mundane waking hours are largely devoted to dealing with the often difficult but almost always pretty insignificant details of operating a small buisness in Australia in a set of marketplaces that change continually, in minor ways, over time but overall remain fairly 'stable'. Similarly with suppliers and other providers to the marketplaces - nothing much changes 'day to day' and the constant gradual changes are discernible to anyone who spends a realistic amount of time ensuring that they put themselves in the way of obtaining and then understanding the information - pretty much me I would have thought until very recently.....but now I have my doubts.
No, I'm not smoking anything virulent or even anything at all (haven't done for 20 or so years) and I don't need to up, or down, my meds - I haven't been to a doctor in decades and it's also far too early in the day for alcohol to have worked it's magic on my perceptions generally. We have a board meeting early this afternoon preceded by a 'director's briefing' by the various departmental managers within Exetel. These are standard, scheduled monthly events of no great import - just the required information interchanges that occur, in one way or another, in most realistically managed commercial operations around the world....and those events require a rested mind and a clear head.
I will play my usual part in these meetings and do my best to make sensible suggestions and ask enough questions to ensure that I understand what is important for me to understand. However, while everything within Exetel's quite complex operations and developments appears to be pretty much 'as usual' the "outside worlds" that we interconnect with appear to be anything but 'normal'.
I say this because I have reviewed the emails I received overnight and, apart from the sheer surprise that people who have hitherto regarded 5.30 pm as the beginning of an immutable 15 hour communications curfew actually wrote to me overnight, it was the content of what they wrote that made me get a strong cup of coffee and go outside to drink it to ensure there were no hallucingens leaking from the refrigerator or other kitchen appliances that were unbalancing my mind.
In summary the supplier world seems to have changed at some previously undetected, but very recent, moment in the past to the point that hardware, software, several different services and two key services have all plunged in price. I quickly checked the $A exchange rates against the $US, the Euro and the Yen expecting to see some miracuous appreciation in its value since yesterday but there was no such thing - it had actually reduced a little.
So it now seems that Exetel can buy ADSL2 DSLAMs for 'free for 24 months, HSPA modems at half the previous price which was itself one third of Optus' price, Yagi antennae at one third the previous price, software maintenance at one quarter the previous prices and various services at 40% or more less than we previously paid. Nice early Christmas presents/late Easter presents (and I did check it wasn't some sort of ground hog day version of April 1st). But what has caused this excessive generosity and since when has Exetel with its miniscule buying volumes become so many different suppliers of so many different products/services "new best friend" - literally - overnight?
I have no idea....perhaps a whole lot of companies around the world that used to buy those products and services have been engulfed by the 'GFC' and fire sales on communications 'components' have begun? Perhaps there are so few buyers of communications 'components' left in Australia that Exetel is actually one of the few 'buyers' capable of paying its bills? Or....I still have absolutely no idea.
Thank goodness it is the weekend tomorrow.....I can't begin to work out what should be done in this Alice In Wonderland communications world..........