Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • How the cloud beat the telcos

    How the cloud beat the telcos

    Yesterday this site looked at the telcos’ battle to diversify in a world of declining sales and margins.

    One of the areas where telecommunications providers failed dismally was in data centres – what should have been a relatively easy area for them to move into turned out to be an industry that was culturally alien to them.

    This week showed how costly that failure was for the telcos as AWS, Microsoft and Google all reported huge growth in their cloud revenues. Microsoft’s cloud business nearly doubled in value while AWS grew almost 50%.

    While for Google, the company is still grossly dependent upon advertising for its profits, at least their cloud services are the fastest growing part of their business. Their struggle to diversify is beginning to show some results.

    The telcos though can only look and wonder at what might have been.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • Telcos and the battle to diversify

    Telcos and the battle to diversify

    How Australia’s incumbent telco, Telstra, deals with the industry’s commoditisation is the topic of my interview in Diginomica with the company’s Hong Kong based director of Global Platforms, Jim Fagan.

    The need to diversify is pressing upon Telstra with the company’s income down 3.6% in its last financial report with mobile sales, by far their biggest revenue earner, down eight percent.

    Across the developed world, telcos are seeing their markets slowing with global smartphones sales largely static, formerly big profit generators like SMS declining and broadband data rates collapsing.

    In the US both formerly untouchable telcos are struggling which has seen them attempting to diversify with AT&T buying Time-Warner for $85 billion and Verizon buying Yahoo! despite its problems that saw a $250 million discount after the service’s hacking scandal.

    With the pressures on the telco industry, it’s not surprising they are looking at alternative income streams and Telstra’s strategy seems to play more to their traditional strengths than a media play, which Telstra has tried previously and failed.

    It could be though that Telstra, like all telcos, could be destined to become a utility service. While that might disappoint executives and shareholders who dream of glamour, excitement and high profits, that might not be a bad thing.

     

    Similar posts:

  • How your next CEO could be a robot

    How your next CEO could be a robot

    “In 30 years, a robot will likely be on the cover of Time Magazine as the best CEO,” Alibaba founder Jack Ma said told a technology conference in Zengzhou, China, last weekend.

    One of the things underestimated about this wave of automation is how AI will be applied to management, Knowledge Management expert Euan Semple makes an important point how being supervised by a bot could be a lot fairer and transparent than human managers.

    In the normal course of work many people don’t see much of their manager. Too often the experience is frustrating and unhelpful. The predictability and transparency of automated systems could potentially be fairer and more effective than an incompetent, prejudiced, or bullying manager.

    The news for those looking at climbing the greasy management pole through getting professional qualifications isn’t good either, reports the BBC.

    For the last fifty years, getting an accounting or law degree, often supplemented by an MBA, was the best path for a management position but shifting work patterns and technology is devaluing those qualifications while it’s appearing there will be less management positions anyway.

    Tomorrow’s workplace is going to look very different to that of the past half century. Those of us currently in the workforce, as well today’s kids, need to be looking closely at the skills they have for a very different world.

    Similar posts:

  • When the middlemen get desperate

    When the middlemen get desperate

     

    Sometimes business practices go bad. A good example of this is a survey of restaurant reservation systems by the Marketing4Restaurants website.

    A striking allegation in the survey is how some of these services advertise on Google against their own clients, called ‘adwords arbitrage’ by one competitor to the established booking services.

    One of the failed promises of the internet was the removal of the middlemen. Many of us thought the web would enable businesses and individuals to communicate directly to the public without the need for intermediaries.

    We were wrong, rather than eliminating middleman the internet gave birth to a new breed of bigger global breed with the rise of Google, Facebook and Amazon being the most prominent.

    The success of the ticket clipping culture has seen thousands of platform services and online exchanges that do little more than try to lock small businesses and contractors into into their systems for little if any benefit.

    However advertising against your own customers as Open Table and Dimmi are alleged to do is another level of bastardry and, at least in Australia, quite possibly illegal.

    Even if this behaviour does turn out to be within the letter of the law, a business competing against its own customers is being run by ethically challenged people and is almost certainly doomed in the medium term – what client is going to pay to subsidise its competitors?

    As internet startups struggle to justify huge investor valuations we can expect more behaviour like this. Hopefully though most of those businesses, and the investors who fund them, are doomed.

    Similar posts:

  • Juicing innovation

    Juicing innovation

    Every tech boom has its excesses and it’s hard to go past the Juicero as the most egregious of today’s mania.

    A number of high profile investors, including Google’s venture capital arm, have poured $120 million dollars into the internet connected device that squeezes juice from pre-prepared pouches of pulped fruit and vegetables.

    Bloomberg found the devices don’t a great deal as the juice can be squeezed out of the packs by hand, which is just as well given the microchipped pulp containers can be disabled by the manufacturer.

    While the Juicero aims to be the juicer equivalent of the Keurig coffee capsule, the device’s expense, built in obsolescence and unnecessary waste is emblematic of everything  that’s wrong with the current Silicon Valley culture.

    The fundamental question of any business idea is ‘what problem does this solve?’ It’s hard to think of anything the Juicero fixes.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts