:: The Park Paradigm ::

Markets for the Digital Generation

Well done to Bank of America for seizing the opportunity enabled by advancing mobile tele-computing appliances. Of course I’m talking about the iPhone, and when I predicted back in January that the possibilities created by such mobile and user friendly (at least for those who don’t have giant digits) hardware would lead to an opening up of a whole new frontier in mobile markets and commerce, I have to admit I was too cynical to think that a giant like Bank of America would be leading the way:

In a move sure to set a precedent, Bank of America is the first banking application featured on Apple’s iPhone App directory.

Here’s their intro:

Bank of America Mobile Banking is available to all Online Banking customers. With Mobile Banking you can use your iPhone or iPod touch to easily and securely check your balance, pay your bills, transfer funds, or find a nearby ATM or banking center. It’s easy, fast, and convenient — just use the Safari browser on your iPhone or iPod touch to go to www.bofa.mobi and you can get started.

Although other banks have mobile banking Websites that work equally well on the iPhone, they’re the first to proactively promote it as an iPhone app. It’s a smart move given that many sites still need to tweak their interface code to be optimized on the iPhone screen. As a result, iPhone users are often frustrated with their experience on sites that are not optimized.

In time I think any service - certainly any financial service - that is time sensitive (all trading services and many others) will need to be offered conveniently (!) on and optimized for mobile devices. This is certainly true of ‘retail’ services but I’ll go out on a limb and say that it will be equally important for institutional (wholesale) financial services as well. As people get a taste of not being tied to their desks or workstation, they will come to demand this functionality (just as once they got a taste of mobile email via the blackberry, they would no longer live without it.)

Secondly (and in my view much more important and interesting), the very existence of the possibility of easily ‘trading’ in any market anywhere is both a sine qua non and will be a driver of (in a virtuous circle) the development of traded markets in anything and everything (that is worth trading) - in particular anywhere there is a need to allocate a scarce resource or a need to assign a probability to any given outcome. The Age of Markets will be made possible by the very low barrier to market participation that comes as a result of: (1) the ability to trade electronically (either the informational goods themselves or derivatives of real physical goods and services), (2) massive and cheap computing power driving marginal transaction costs to zero, (3) abundant wireless data bandwidth, and (4) powerful and intuitive mobile computing devices (combining state-of-the-art hardware with innovative and easy-to-use user interfaces.) The ability for billions of people to express their preferences through a market as easily as they can state their opinions aloud will allow these thousands of markets to bloom.

I know I’m skating over a lot of the details, but I think many regular readers will be able to fill in the blanks and get my meaning. And for those that don’t, you’ll just have to trust me - check back in 20 years and we’ll see if I’m right.

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Metro reports this morning that 6% of adults in the UK - a million people - regularly use their credit cards to make their mortgage payments:

More than 1million people use high-interest credit cards to cover their mortgage or rent payments, debt experts say. Six per cent of householders have turned to plastic to pay for the roof over their heads during the past year, according to housing charity Shelter.

Young people struggling to stay on the property ladder are most likely to use the ‘rob Peter to pay Paul tactics’, despite risking long-term ruin. Many credit card companies charge interest between 15 and 18 per cent – up to three times higher than typical mortgage rates.

Clearly - and I would expect all my readers to understand this - borrowing at 15% to pay off debt contracted at 6 to 8% is financial lunacy. (It’s called negative carry and you have to have a damn good reason to hold a position like that for any length of time.) There may be an argument to do so occasionally for one or two months if you are facing an exceptional and short term liquidity shortfall as the ease and convenience (ie opportunity cost) of using an existing committed line of credit (ie a credit card) offsets the extra interest cost. Indeed this may be the case for some of these people. However for most I suspect it reflects two failures that should be addressable: firstly it reflects a basic lack of financial (mathematical?) literacy among a substantial proportion of the population, secondly it reflects a lack of appropriate basic banking (lending) products, or awareness of those that do exist.

A cynic would say that it is easier for a lender to price (and thus provide) ‘credit card’ debt and so this is what is offered. It is true that credit card risks - being very granular, and widely distributed, and having a relatively long history (through various economic cycles) - are more easily modeled using statistical techniques. Indeed this is why you haven’t seen distress in the market for credit-card backed securities as opposed to mortgage-backed securities: they tend to behave as modeled and so the stress tests used to structure these securities tend to reasonably accurately represent real life losses under economic stress. Indeed, the high interest rates reflect the probability of high expected losses. Looked at from a portfolio point of view, credit card receivables are less ‘lumpy’ and losses more normally correlated and distributed than most other kinds of lending. Of course one of the reasons that mortgage loans cost less and are typically seen as ’safe’ (or at least safer) assets is that they are secured on real property (and in the case of a primary residence, seen as the first in the queue for repayment as people are loathe to lose their homes.) The problem with this (as is being brought home in spades by events in the US) is that the lender faces two residual risks - one the value of the underlying real property can change (go down) and the transaction costs involved in ‘realizing’ (ie foreclosing: taking ownership and liquidating the property to repay a delinquent loan) are typically very high (it depends on the legal regime and labor costs but these can often be as much as 20-30% of the value of the property, especially for lower value homes.)

So what can be done? Schools, but also financial institutions, need to do a better job of educating their citizens/customers. You need a driver’s licence to drive a car. Perhaps you should have a borrower’s licence to take out a loan? Ok perhaps not - I’d much rather see a market solution, and I suspect there must be a long term commercial benefit to financial institutions who take this responsibility seriously (and not just as a box-ticking exercise under regulatory duress.) Perhaps new innovative start-ups like Kublax will start making a difference in this area.

Next, financial institutions need to pro-actively offer better overall financial solutions to their customers. For most high-street banks however there may be a inherent conflict of interest in promoting more intelligent solutions to credit cards. (Don’t misunderstand me, credit cards are a fantastic product when used appropriately - ie for 20-40 day ‘working capital’ rolling credit, but they should always be paid off in full, or at worst used for very short term cashflow smoothing as per above.) Ideas like the various ‘One’ accounts, which automatically offset deposits with mortgage debts should be extended to consolidate all assets and liabilities. An idea I’ve been thinking about for several years is to create a company that would help individuals manage their personal balance sheet in a professional way. I suspect that the vast majority of people don’t really know what a balance sheet is, and amongst those that do, few think of their own finances in this way, other than perhaps momentarily when applying for a mortgage or writing a will. Perhaps I am naive but I believe the concept of a balance sheet - stripped of jargon and intellectual snobbery - is one that the vast majority of people could grasp if presented in a friendly and clear manner.

Finally, if banks won’t help their customers contract more appropriate debt, I hope more people will make recourse to markets like Zopa for unsecured financing. Aside from getting better rates, participating in a market like Zopa forces people to spend a little time thinking about their balance sheet and how credit markets work (even if they probably wouldn’t articulate in this way.) Zopa is user friendly and welcoming in a way that banks - despite I’ll admit some efforts to improve their public perception - just aren’t.

Of course none of this will help anyone who is bound and determined to spend more than they earn (or more accurately will earn), but I suspect that many of those struggling with managing their finances would welcome a helping hand in having a better understanding of their financial situation and the options available to them.

Next up: taking option theory to the masses.

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Which US presidential candidate will be the first to stake out a common-sense, commercially intelligent, free-markets-based position on intellectual property rights and privacy in the campaign for 2008?

Which Fortune 100 CEO(s) will be the first to endorse these policies and get on the right side of their customers?

And how long will the great American Joe and Jill Public sit back and let the narrow and short-sighted lobbyists, jurists and legislators entrench an (artificial) 19th century paradigm on the 21st century knowledge-based economy?

Well I don’t know the answers to these three questions but if I had to take a guess I would say:

1) Obama ? Bloomberg ?

2) Jeff Immelt? Thing is, the answer should be all of them: how many business school case studies and courses does it take to drive home the fundamental tenet of business which is treat your customers with respect??? And once, just once I’d like to see a leading US CEO come out in favour of truly free and competitive markets (not the gummed up, carved up, oligopolies that too often pass for markets these days…) Why Jeff? Well he seems like a strong leader and one that genuinely has a long term view, and as head of GE can get away with saying and doing what he thinks is right. It would be nice if he had a talk to the folks who work for him at NBC…

(3) I hope my optimism on this front isn’t just naivete…but I suspect most people are very close to the tipping point and will get increasingly angry and vocal in the fight against stupidity.

So what am I talking about? Dumb DRM and dumb business models. (Via Bill St. Arnaud) Mark Gibbs at NetworkWorld asks us to “Forget Big Brother” and “Watch out for Big Entertainment”:

Last week I discussed the doublethink and newspeak of “the Campaign to Protect America,” an initiative launched by the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy as well as the shameful strong-arm bullying tactics of the Recording Industry Association of America.

My big concern about this coalition is that it isn’t just about Big Entertainment trying to stop “piracy”, it also includes the National Association of Manufacturers and Big Pharma on the pretext of addressing the problems of counterfeiting.

As I suggested at the end of last week’s rant, the CACP ploy could be very bad news for us all because its goal will be to extend the law into all sorts of areas where we really don’t want it and I threatened that this week I’d look at what it might be able to do.

Here’s the worst case scenario: Consumer PCs would, by law, be directly monitored by ISPs to ensure compliance, and the legal consequences for any attempt to circumvent mointoring would make the punishment for murder look like a slap on the wrist.

He goes on to tell us of how the friendly folks at NBC are thinking about things:

Remember Rick Cotton, NBC/Universal general counsel, who I mentioned last week? A couple of weeks ago he actually suggested that ISPs spend more of their time spying on users and then added that the law be changed to remove the Safe Harbor provisions that protect ISPs when their customers have pirated materials! According to several sources, Cotton would like to see ISPs forced to use “readily available means to prevent the use of their broadband capacity to transfer pirated content.”

Wow.

Clearly regular readers will know that I am not some woolly dreamer who doesn’t believe in making money or getting paid for ‘brain-based’ services. On the contrary my livelihood depends on being paid for ‘brain-created’ value. But I also realize that business models and ecosystems evolve and so what worked or more importantly still - what was appropriate - 20 years ago is unlikely to work today, and will almost certainly not work a decade from now. It seems to me self evident that the underlying ‘asset’ in the entertainment industry - talent in the jargon - remains as valuable, probably moreso than it ever was. I have no hesitation in believing that talented entertainers will continue to thrive financially and otherwise in the future including (and most likely) operating in an entirely different business paradigm to that which existed in the second half of the 20th century. I’m not an expert, but even I can see a few possible outcomes and business models that might work extremely well for the artists and their customers (the audience…) - think ‘because of’ rather than ‘with’ (to steal a great line out of Doc & JP’s books…) I mean even the Economist has figured it out:

The shift away from recorded music is due in part to the recognition that touring and merchandise are more lucrative. But it may also be a consequence of internet piracy, as free downloads give music fans more money to spend on other things. Jwana Godinho, the director of Música no Coração, a concert promoter in Lisbon, thinks many music lovers have a “mental budget” that they are prepared to spend on music, and have switched their spending from CDs to tickets and merchandise.

The logical conclusion is for artists to give away their music as a promotional tool. Some are doing just that. This week Prince announced that his new album, “Planet Earth”, will be given away in Britain for free with the Mail on Sunday, a national newspaper, on July 15th. (For years Prince has made far more money from live performances than from album sales; he was the industry’s top earner in 2004.) Outraged British music retailers were quick to condemn the idea. As far as the record industry is concerned, it is madness. But for the music industry, it could well be the shape of things to come.

Which reminds me of this fantastic quote (the epitome of leadership in crisis don’t you think?) picked up via pmarca:

UK’s Entertainment Retailers Association co-chairman Paul Quirk, who apparently doubles as a mafia boss, defending a doomed distribution network (retail CD stores) from a doomed medium (Prince’s new CD) being bundled with another doomed medium (the Sunday print edition of the UK newspaper The Mail):

“It would be an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career. It would be yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday.”

The problem is not how the artists make a living. The problem is how do the intermediaries that have been successful in this industry over the last 50 years continue to make a living. They are the ones having an awfully hard time seeing how they can continue to be successful with the same business model (and a truckload of extra lawyers) over the next 50 years. Only problem is…they are looking for something that will NEVER HAPPEN. Ummm…let me see, how can I put it… IT’S OVER! FINITO. HASTA LA VISTA. Hmmm…probably not clear enough but…

They can’t make money from their old business paradigm going forward. It won’t work. I’m not suggesting they should be doing cartwheels or that they shouldn’t be worried, or scared or even a bit angry…even denial is a normal emotional response to loss. Yes it sucks (for them.) However…no amount of denial or anger or - yes ultimately even lawyers - is going to put this genie back in the bottle, and so rather than beating up paying customers you would have to think that there is an unbelievable opportunity for some of the smartest people and firms in this business to get a jump on all the others and become part of inventing the next business paradigm for music and visual arts. Remember my contention is that the existing business model is bankrupt, not that no useful, customer-friendly and profitable business model (needing of course lots of talented people to make it work) exists. An important distinction, at least in my book.

And why I was so sad to see last.fm absorbed into the maw of CBS (even if I can totally understand why the founders and investors might have taken this particular nickel…) and why I can only hope it turns into a sort of reverse take-over in the end. (I’m thinking of a music industry version of O’Connor into SBC into UBS…)

Markets. Talent. Intermediaries. Broking. Distribution. Customers. Disruption driven by technological and cultural change can happen in any industry where these elements exist.

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(from The Incredibles:)

Gilbert Huph: I’m not happy, Bob. Not happy. Ask me why.
Bob: Okay. Why?
Gilbert Huph: Why what? Be specific, Bob.
Bob: Why are you unhappy?
Gilbert Huph: Your customers make me unhappy.
Bob: Why? Have you gotten complaints?
Gilbert Huph: Complaints I can handle. What I can’t handle is your customers’ inexplicable knowledge of Insuricare’s inner workings. They’re experts! Experts, Bob! Exploiting every loophole! Dodging every obstacle! They’re penetrating the bureaucracy!

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An interesting new marketing campaign by the french mutual bank Credit Mutuel is based around a website www.sijetaisbanquier.com (ie www.ifIwereabanker.com); a classic drive to solicit customer feedback but making good use of the internet and the idea (especially relevant for a mutual) of community.

The website is a bit too ‘traditional marketing look-and-feel’ for my tastes, but on the other hand might well play better to their target constituency who may well not be familiar or comfortable with a proper Web2.0/social software type approach. The website is also supported by a significant mass media campaign, in particular television (you can watch the ads on the website.)

In any event, scrolling through the ideas submitted, there are many good ones, most of these relying on nothing more than common sense but nonetheless hardly or never applied in retail banking to date. But that is exactly the point. Will be interesting to see what this leads to in terms of new products or services and if it improves their market position. As everyone knows, getting people to change banks (unless they are actually stealing from you) is bloody nigh well impossible!

(btw all these links are obviously in French.)

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It is some small consolation to see that I am not alone (read it - it’s funny and oh so true! and there are dozens more on the same blog for those mobile-phone rubberneckers out there…) in finding T-mobile to be laughably bad in almost everything they do…although the joke is sort of on me because our household gives them about £60 per month for an incredibly poor experience. But to face wasting several hours - probably more - trying to port out of this pink hell, just doesn’t seem worth it. So I try to use my phone as little as possible (preferring landlines, skype, my other mobile phone and smoke signals to giving them a penny more than I’m stuck with in my plan.

For those of you that like the grass-roots/anecdotal/kick-the-tires investing style, I guess this would be a big sell signal on Deutsche Telekom. Makes you really wonder what the (usually) extremely sharp people at Blackstone were thinking…then again if they could take control, they certainly is - how do you say? - upside with respect to running the business less incompetently. Not sure the unions would be thrilled however…

Anyhow I reiterate my plea - port me outta here!

[see here for background]

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Some of you might recall my desperate plea to be extracted from the mobile phone hell that is T-mobile…well it is as of yet unanswered (and I am still in hell…although I now consciously avoid using my phone whenever possible - my average monthly talk minutes must be down more than 80% on T-mobile and up 1000% - from a low base - on Skype)… but it was nice to see that misery has company! Check out Martin’s great T-stuck and T-rash posts!

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More really bad (ie easy to fix/avoid-in-the-first-place) customer service errors.

Starting with the local air travel quasi-monopoly British Airways. I used to be happy to recommend BA to people I knew and was generally very happy with what they had to offer, however over the past few years they have consistently been frittering away this reputation and now, I’d have to say I only fly with them because, well if you live in the UK…there really isn’t any other choice, at least not with anything like the same flexibility, schedule, etc. for a full service airline. (Most major airports in the world have a similar ‘lock-in’ with one major carrier creating a vast network of local monopolies where the customer is basically told to take it or leave it (despite these same customers being the voters that elect the legislators who ultimately oversee the regulators who perpetuate this ridiculously anti-competitive state of affairs…)

Anyhow, yesterday was a classic example of why instead of being treated like a respected and important client of BA (which call-me-crazy but as a gold card holder for the past 7 years and having earned well over a million miles while purchasing thousands and thousands of pounds of their services each year…), I was treated like just another guy with a ticket - rules are rules - move along buddy… I had some excess baggage, and they charge a fortune for extra baggage, £250 in my case…) Doesn’t matter that I’m a gold card holder. Doesn’t matter that on the inbound flight I had no baggage (they didn’t offer me any money back, funny…), doesn’t matter that for that matter, probably on 80+% of the flights I’ve taken with them over the years - most of which have been in business class - I’ve had no baggage, doesn’t matter what the actual amount of baggage/capacity of the flight overall was, you are over the limit sir and unless you pay up your baggage doesn’t go with you. Why don’t all these other things matter? Well because they don’t have any idea of who I am at the agent level … all that data BA has on me, used for nothing more than to send me promotional emails (and since my kids get the same emails, I figure the only data they seem smart enough to use is the email address…) Indeed yesterday I have to say the agent was courteous and seemed even slightly embarrassed (and then relieved that I didn’t jump up and down and shout at him for 5 minutes - I think they get alot of that…) - the problem isn’t the staff, it’s the policies. Their policies don’t recognize top customers, their policies don’t include arming their customer facing employees with customer information, their policies don’t empower employees to make discretionary decisions, basically their policies are more akin to those of a bureaucratic monopoly that those of a customer-focused firm in a competitive marketplace. Very sad indeed and frustrating. Maybe it was appropriate that I pay the excess baggage, perhaps I should have been comp’ed - I don’t know…that’s not what wound me up. What wound me up was the complete lack of any sort coherent customer-aware policy and worse that I didn’t have any course of action: taking my business elsewhere - as long as I am based in London - is just not an option. (It would inconvenience me far more that it might hurt BA’s bottom line…)

Next up CNBC.com… a couple days ago I linked to a video on cnbc.com featuring Weatherbill’s CEO. Today I wanted to show it to someone and clicked on the link. Well, after 24 hours you need to have a paid subscription to see the archives. (I’m not going to debate now whether or not that is a good policy or business model etc. - you can probably guess what I think in any case…) It costs $9.95/mo (no option to pay in another currency of course…); I already pay for a cable subscription to CNBC (gee why wouldn’t they think to offer web access to their cable subscribers…); but I’m more often in front of my laptop than my TV and I think it’s a really good business news service so I thought what the hell and spent 5 minutes signing up and giving them by credit card number. Then I went to back to try an watch the Weatherbill clip. Boom. You need a Windows PC and Media Player to use CNBCplus. Mac and Quicktime users bugger off. Funny thing is the free service works just fine with Quicktime. What the hell is up with that kind of decision??? You actually convince someone to buy a paid subscription to your website and then you give them fewer choices and try to lock them in to one proprietary standard. And they can’t even hide behind some lame excuse that they don’t know how to make it work because it works on the free-to-view site! (Maybe I shouldn’t shout too loud lest they disable this compatibility…)

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I wanted to give BA a constructive suggestion to improve their website. It’s a site I know all too well, and I must say it’s pretty good and encouragingly actually gets better with each new iteration. The suggestion I was going to make was something I’ve been annoyed at for some time now: when you book a flight for your family online, the site does not allow you to enter Executive Club numbers for children which is a real pain in the ass, because now you have to check in physically at the airport and remember to give the agent the kids’ numbers or (and this is what I was doing this evening) you have to go through the somewhat tedious process of claiming ‘missing’ miles online after the fact. What makes this all the more annoying / dumb is that it would make no difference to their booking process to allow a field for the executive club number for all passengers; it is not a required field so I cannot see how their web workflow is improved or simplified by excluding this option. Ah but you might ask, how many kids have executive club numbers? Well obviously I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is quite a few as BA has a great ‘family account’ where you can pool miles from all family members, so if Mom and/or Dad have a card given their frequent business travel, it makes sense to sign up the kids too even if they only fly a couple times a year…

Anyhow why am I writing about this on my blog? Well sheer frustration. Spent a good 15 minutes trying to find a ’suggestions’ mail address or forum or something on the site and nada… One way commerce… we speak - you listen. Very annoying. They should have a blog. Maybe they are scared of their customers? We’re not all angry. At least not all the time. And it would be a million times more useful than those stupid surveys you hand out in the plane that just annoys your clients and embarrasses your staff. I guess no one at BA has read Scoble or Doc or Euan. (Euan there has to be a consulting gig there for you!)

If somehow this message does get to someone at BA who is responsible for the website, please fix the booking bug outlined above. Thanks.

***Update***

Dom has some ’suggestions’ for BA too! …could the someone referred to above fix this as well?

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Are you a mobile phone service provider in the UK?

Is your business focused on providing useful, easy-to-use, easy-to-understand products and services to its customers?

Are you able to handle all the arrangements for transferring my account from an existing provider?

Is your pricing competitive, intuitive and fair (not the cheapest, I’m happy to pay a fair price for good service)?

Even better if you can provide me with both UK and French numbers on the same account, with no ridiculous ‘international’ roaming charges… If so please contact me via this blog. My family currently spends approximately £150 per month on mobile phones, so we are a reasonably good potential customer.

Why am I writing this? Well recently I had to transfer my UK mobile phone accounts from a corporate plan to a personal plan. Given that we had been lumbered with T-Mobile at my old firm (when I first joined it was Orange which had much better coverage, but hey I figured the procurement people must have cut a good deal…), not being particularly interested in spending alot (any) time or energy educating myself and going through the bother of changing providers I just decided to stick with T-Mobile. Inertia. I mean a mobile phone providers are all much of a muchness anyways, right? Bad bad decision.

Since then it has just been one continuous pain in the ass, phones cut off 3 times in 3 weeks - due to insufficient credit limits - and byzantine and ridiculous corporate policies that leave their poor (and in the only bright spot, courteous and trying to help) call centre front line staff in completely exposed and untenable positions with the impossibility of keeping the customer satisfied. In the month since I switched, my wife and I must have spent at least 3 or 4 hours in total on hold or speaking to customer service representatives without resolving anything…what an enormous waste of everyone’s time.

So pushed unwillingly by this desperately poor service, I rolled up my sleeves, headed to Google and started digging into how perhaps I could go about moving to some other service provider. 45 minutes later, I wasn’t any closer to being able to do that - at least easily - and I put my search on hold, quietly facing a unpalatable choice of continuing to pay money to a company that I thought was appalling, or spend at least one of my 30-odd thousand days on this planet, figuring out and implementing (probably at some not insignificant cost and inconvenience) a change in providers…what to do?

The serendipity smiled. Stewing in my miserable dilemma over coffee a couple days ago I get an email from my friend JP who, not content with his full time job , points me towards his new gig guest blogging at the Telegraph: “On the economics of the customer.”

When customers wanted scarce things, their choices were constrained, their freedoms curtailed. As a result they were patient and tolerant and accepted shoddy goods and services, often bought from monopolies or oligopolies.

Today the things that customers want are in abundance, and businesses have to face new challenges. How to make money out of abundance. More precisely, how to make money because of abundance. This is what Doc Searls referred to as The Because Effect in Making A New World, and what Stewart Brand was building upon many years earlier.

This new customer, looking for things that are in abundance, wants simplicity and convenience. Today’s customer is far less tolerant of failure. Of unmet expectations. Of poor experiences. So what do we do?

As technologists, we have two choices:

One is to provide the customer a better experience, the freedom to select what he wants, a differentiation based on service quality against a backdrop of abundance.

The second is to create artificial scarcities around the things that are abundant, create new inconveniences for the customer, new lock-ins, new irritants. Irritants like Region Coding on DVDs. Lock-ins like we see in digital music.

For the last thirty years, too many of us in IT have focussed on creating these artificial scarcities, often without even knowing it. First we paid to bury the data in vendor stacks, then we paid to try and dig it out. We’ve been doing this for years. And we’re in danger of doing it again.

Time for a change.

Time to focus on ways of delivering service where the customer wants, when the customer wants, how the customer wants. Time to focus on open platforms, open protocols, open software, open ways of doing business.

That’s what the economics of abundance is really about. Making money because of what you do, and not with what you do. Having customers who stay with you because they want to, not because they have to. (my emphasis)

(Given that JP now works for a phone company, well I just had to smile… So JP, is BT up to the challenge? )

Well as far as I can tell, neither T-mobile, nor for that matter any of their major competitors (at least from what I can see from their websites) have embraced this approach to their business and their customers. Anyhow JP’s Telegraph guest post inspired me (and reminded me of others he and Doc Searls amongst others) to test out the intention economy and possibly solve my problem by reverse advertising. This is what I want to buy. Who can sell it to me?

And (under the heading “you-can-take-the-boy-out-of-the-trading-room-but-not -the-trader-out-of-the-boy”) if someone sweeps me off my feet with what I really want, I would seriously consider putting on a spread trade - buying their shares and selling short shares in Deutsche Telecom. (These have recently traded up on the back of the elevation of Rene Obermann - the “Bulldozer” (uh…yeah, whatever man…) - as the new CEO due to his ’success’ at running T-mobile. Oh the irony…) I however am sceptical that any of the continental incumbents will be able to reinvent themselves and emerge from under the weight of statist history and culture to become organizations that put their customers first and embrace an open and intellegent relationship with the marketplace where success is based not on protecting historical monopoly rents but by giving people something they happily and without coercion want to buy. The Economist seems to think that competition and consolidation between these ‘dinosaurs’ will make things better for consumers. I beg to differ, we don’t need even bigger, more complex, more bureaucratic telecom providers. We need more Skypes. Smart, agile, close-to-the-customer companies. Hey if nobody shows up to solve my problem, maybe I’ll start a company to solve it myself when the snow melts next spring. I don’t know much (now) about how to do it, but I know it would be a winning proposition. Interested venture capitalists and communication services entrepreneurs you know where to find me…

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