John Linton ....in terms of the weather anyway - hopefully it will be much calmer in business attributes.
I slept well past my usual 'getting up time' this morning due to the residual jet lag of time shifting five and a half hours 'backwards' for the past week and just the general tiredness generated by awkward travel connections and packing a lot of additional work in to a short time frame. One or two incidents on the trip have reminded me that I no longer have the immense capacities for staying awake with a mind that functions correctly as I used to do. I think I've finally reached my limit in that respect. Perhaps the only amazing thing is that it has lasted this long.
I checked my 'diary' which is mercifully 'uncrowded' except for a few appointments with some relatively interesting people and catching up on the projects that I deferred most work on for a week while I was away. One thing has become a constant in Australian communications life over the past 18 months or so is the constant change and the constant increase in that rate of change that ensures that almost any planning that you do is rendered pointless in shorter and shorter time frames. I'm not sure what we would do if we didn't have razor sharp company objectives and the flexibility of mind (and possibly extensive knowledge) to deal with the multiplicity of 'challenges' with which we have been and are being confronted over recent months. I will be interested to see whether I notice any differences having been away for a week.
The major 'activities' that we have to try and complete before the end of January is the complete 're-vamp' of small business business services and develop ways of direct selling them rather than continuing to use our 'passive marketing' via our web site. It seems pretty easy to say you will 'turn on' another marketplace but the actuality is there is a great deal of quite complex work involved to specify the products, devise the sales stories, create the application, provisioning and support services and, by no means least, recruit and train the people, select the management and make it happen generally.....while you are locked in a 'death struggle' with your current two major marketplaces. Perhaps overly dramatic descriptions of what has to be done - but pretty much along those lines and in those circumstances.
If that is the case why do it? Well - "no real option" springs immediately to mind. The residential marketplaces are already trashed and will continue to become even more trashed when both iinet and TPG realise just what Telstra is planning to do or realises, if they don't already, that Telstra is deadly serious in successfully carrying out their plans to reef back 10% plus of the current ADSL and associated wire line revenues they have previously lost. That 10% turns in to more like 20% when you 'count the cost' of reducing the ARPU those other companies are currently achieving as they try and ward off the Telstra attempts using their massive and, in real terms, inexhaustible funding they are making and will make available to achieve their targets. So, no 'joy' is likely to be forthcoming in the residential ADSL marketplaces in the foreseeable future other than lower revenue per customer and increased costs per customer.....and, for everyone but Telstra...... less customers. No difference to what Telstra needs, not wants, to achieve.
Maybe I'm seeing it all wrong. But if I'm vaguely correct every dollar spent on 'residential' promotion by non-Telstra sources is an additional dollar wasted by the spenders and will make absolutely no difference in the face of Telstra's onslaught. In those circumstances, should they be true, the only solution is to try a marketplace or two to which bulk advertising and 'free' gigabytes aren't remotely relevant.
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