by Rich KarpinskiDecember 5th, 2007
A very forthcoming Lowell McAdam, CEO of Verizon Wireless, told Business Week that despite not signing on at launch, VZW will support Google’s Android open mobile software project.
Telephony’s own Kevin Fitchard has done a great job covering Verizon’s recent moves to open up its network, a move that seemed to be motivated by Android. McAdam’s admits it was: “Android really facilitated this move,” he said.
The move to open its network is about two things: one, keeping Verizon Wireless growing even as mobile phone penetration in the U.S. reaches saturation level, and two, a very candid admission of a search for cost savings Says the Business Week article:
When Verizon Wireless was founded in 2000, it ran 27 call centers to provide customer service. The company cut back to as few as 17 centers at one point, but the count is now back to 25, each with about a thousand employees. The company’s 2,300 stores, staffed by 20,000 employees, are also costly. While workers in those stores used to spend nearly the entire day signing up new customers, now only a tenth of their time is consumed by new subscribers. Instead, the bulk of their energy goes to helping current subscribers with questions and problems. McAdam & Co. decided the business model was not sustainable. “If we get to 150 million customers, boy, that’s a lot of overhead,” says McAdam.
In an open-access model, though, Verizon Wireless won’t offer the same level of customer service as it does for the roughly 50 phone models featured in its handset lineup. Though the company will insist on testing all phones developed to run on its network in the open-access program, Verizon plans only to ensure the wireless connection is working for customers who buy those devices. “They have to talk to their handset provider or their application provider if they have particular issues,” McAdam says.
Philosophical drivers of “open” networks are nice, but a service provider CEO admitting a business model consideration — especially one, that if you cut through it, can basically defined as “lower costs through less customer service” — is refreshing in its honesty.
Hard to say how subscribers will take to it, but they asked for an “open garden” didn’t they ; >
Related Topics: All stories, Telco 2.0 |
by Rich KarpinskiDecember 5th, 2007
Bell Labs was the crown jewel spot for hard scientists to work in the commercial realm.
What’s the Web 2.0 equivalent? Why Google of course. Writes Ethan Stock, founder and CEO of Zvents:
A huge portion of Google’s opex is people, and many of those people are the systems guys who built fundamental software infrastructure like UNIX, C, and TCP/IP. Those guys aren’t there for their halo effect – they’re there, despite Google’s youth bias, to build software infrastructure.
Scan this Bell Labs alumni list, and see how many times Google comes up as a current gig.
Answer: 21.
To the left: picture of the lobby of Bell Labs in Holmdel, N.J.
Related Topics: All stories, Telco 2.0 |
by Rich KarpinskiDecember 5th, 2007
If love means never having to say you’re sorry, than a $15 billion valuation must mean: push a user-infuriating strategy as far as you can until finally admitting you were wrong.
If you’ve been following the saga (here, here and here), Facebook’s Beacon pushed word-of-mouth social advertising to the very edge: activities that Facebook users took on other sites — including purchases on sites like Overstock.com and rentals at Blockbuster.com — would be broadcast to all of those user’s Facebook friends. To participate, sites only had to deploy a bit of code on their pages.
The fury occurred when Facebook originally defaulted to an opt-out process. If you didn’t explicitly cancel each data exchange as it was happening, your info would be broadcast out. It later back-tracked to make it opt-in, requiring users to agree to have their data shared — but again on a case by case basis. Today, it added total opt-out into its controls. With a single click, users can do away with the data exchange — forever and universally. Wrote CEO Mark Zuckerberg today:
…We missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share….People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.
So what’s left here? There’s a very good chance that Facebook’s 50 million users will continue to share their online activities (including e-commerce activities) with one another, albeit with greater control. If that’s the case, Beacon still has a chance to be an important step forward in word-of-mouth marketing.
The last time Facebook had a major privacy issue (with the launch of its NewsFeed, which sent on-Facebook updates to friends) once the problems were addressed it become Facebook’s signature feature.
Meanwhile, it may very well be that privacy concerns aren’t a worry for younger users, as pointed out by this blogger. Or that Facebook users didn’t even notice the hubub at all, according to this poll of Facebook users by blog Valleywag:
Related Topics: All stories, Social Networks |
