John Linton .....as boringly tough.
It's actually sunny in Sydney this morning which is always a plus - something you don't realise when you have an extended period of cloudy and rainy mornings - hopefully that change in weather will set the 'tone' for the week. I have a fairly crowded schedule over the next five days with a series of meetings scheduled 'outside' the company as well as a continuation of the internal meetings addressing current issues on top of the work that needs to be done on the FY2012 business plan. I can still remember the days, not long ago at all, when a meeting was an unusual event within Exetel.
It seems to me that the different pressures (Telstra win back programs, 'NBN2' uncertainties, various competitor's and supplier's reactions to the first two points) under which the markets have been operating over the last two years or so are producing a 'dullness' that is influencing working days equivalent to the long rainy period that Sydney has suffered from recently. It's obvious a personal view as it's only based on what I read in the media and what I hear and read in my personal correspondence. I had a series of email and telephone exchanges over the weekend with two people I know at least well enough for them to have my email address or personal phone number. Each of these 'correspondents' addressed very different users but they both had the same theme - doing something completely different to what they were currently doing as their current working days were providing no real interest to them.
When I listened to what they were saying I agreed that it was a period in the industry when, for long term people the combination of the 'NBN2' and a saturated ADSL market had produced days of 'sameness' for a long period of time now and much of the constant change the industry has generated for the past 20 - 30 years is very definitely missing with a huge amount of mental and physical energy going into maintaining current customer bases and market positions by the majority of companies in the Australian communications markets. While we all agreed the current situation would change within the next two years we tended to indulge ourselves about how we missed the 'old days'. I suppose all that shows is that each of us is not well equipped to deal with static technologies and markets.
However it is a fair point that today's markets, apart from being very tough, are also, perhaps for the majority of suppliers, very boring - at least in superficial terms. It isn't exciting or even very satisfying to operate in marketplaces that have apparently lost any interest in innovation and are based solidly from the customer end on price reduction and from the supplier end on customer retention leading to the inevitability of lower margins and supplier failures. Unthinking customers, in any industry and in any marketplaces, tend to drive out innovation or even acceptable service as providers and choice reduces......and perhaps that is as it should be (banks, insurance, oil, minerals, political parties all being pertinent examples of how buyers reap as they sow). In most markets there is no need for a diversity of providers - the base product (money, oil, coal etc) needing no innovation or development to 'improve' them....they are based on immutable objects that a 'silicone valley' cannot invent improvements to.
So my conclusion was that little can be done in today's residential markets to improve customer service or service while there is so much uncertainty constraining the 30 years of innovation and change some of us have become used to. If by some miracle there ever is an 'NBN2' in this country then the people who made such a thing possible will see why you need silicon valleys to move an industry forward rather than the dead hand of government. But the current 'NBN2' decisions have been made by a worthless egotist and then allowed to continue by people who have less than zero experience or knowledge of how and why communications technologies, and their delivery, have been optimally achieved over the past 1,000 years. If they had they would know that, not once in a millenium, has any government made any contributions to progress except negative ones.
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