John Linton "New Paradigm" and "Paradigm Shift" are over-used phrases (and almost always used incorrectly) ever since some American (I assume) marketing course introduced the word to its ill educated attendees who subsequently found it useful to fudge every future presentation to senior management that they couldn't articulate any real commonsense in. Perhaps an overstatement but you get my view on the usage of such phrases. So I was disappointed over the weekend to see that no less than three of my correspondents had used one or other of those phrases in our correspondence on wireless provisioning and the mooted TPG business fibre costs.
There is no "paradigm" involved in under provisioning bandwidth on wireless networks - simply at best 'sharp practice' but in reality just simple dishonesty. The fact that "everyone does it" is about as ethical for business 'marketing' personnel to use as the people who steal other people's property via illegal downloads who use the identical phrase.
Similarly there is no 'paradigm' shift/new/or otherwise involved in a company taking a view that they can use assets built by a company they have acquired differently to the way the original company used them - I thought that was the whole point of companies taking over other companies.... to use the assets more productively.
It really doesn't matter what words you wish to use in either of these cases the actuality will remain the same and the reality of services based on technology......selling prices fall over time in ways and levels that are inconvenient to long term market leaders who have become used to their profit margins increasing constantly by not passing on the advantages of technology delivered cost savings and, over time, creating a completely falsely premised price structure....which then gets exposed by some new/more daring/more desperate 'player' in any technological marketplace.
I have had less that 72 hours to 'digest' what I have apparently learned about some, apparently wide spread, provisioning policies by various wireless broadband sellers and even less than that to assimilate what TPG's 'new' business offers may mean to Exetel. In the past this would have been more than enough time to reach a conclusion on what this might mean to Exetel and to then formulate any required changes to current and medium term 'strategies'. These days I will take a little longer to offer my views on what we might do as a few more days will not make any difference and it will allow other people within the company to understand the scenarios and come up with their own ideas.
I have started to put in place the simple changes to our web site that will deal with the TPG offerings and those should be completed today. We will hold a meeting this morning to make whatever changes we decide are appropriate to the wireless broadband plans and we will get whatever changes are necessary to be made to our current supply contract as quickly as our supplier can make them happen with a view to putting the changes to our wireless broadband offerings in place before the end of this week. In the mean time we have to deal with the ever tougher issues that routinely confront every part of our business in these ever more difficult market conditions.
I think the only positive that comes out of the constant changes with which we are being confronted is that they affect our competitors more seriously than they ever affect us and we are small enough to deal with them, as best we ever can, far more quickly than our larger competitors.
Meanwhile the 'cargo cult' NBN2 remains a huge dark shadow over any form of rational decision making and continues to drive the Australian communications industry into a new 'dark age':
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/230989,consensus-evaporates-on-nbn-model.aspx
"Always look on the bright side of life"....but sometimes it's really hard to do.
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