Verizon Just Doesn't Get It

Business is about more than neat technology, flashy phones, high-speed services, and the next new thing. That would be life it was lived by a technologist. In reality, the world is filled with people who must provide for their families, obtain a little enjoyment from life, and make their money go as far as possible in these hard times. Unfortunately, many companies just don't get it.

Take for example Verizon. They are a large, multi-product company that provides a variety of telecommunication services to their customers. I all honesty, many of their products are quite good. However, if you ever want to interact with the company, you will find yourself in a customer service hell. If you go to their Web site, you will find it to be the most convoluted mishmash of links where you may be able to FIND what you want, but not able to ACCESS what you want. If you call them directly, you will find yourself in a phone tree where you will end up climbing around the roots, but never able to get to the limb you wanted. If you should be so lucky to actually talk to a human-being (an iffy proposition in itself), you will find the person will not provide you with any information unless you provide the magic information--information in many cases that may only be available if you access their web site.

Verizon is not the first, to be sure, to have fallen into the techno-trap. The poster child would be Microsoft and their rollout of Windows Vista--a poorly designed, tested, and implemented product. As a result, it was almost universally reviled and companies, their most important customers, refused to use it. The case can be made that Vista may have single-handedly contributed to the PC sales slump in the last couple of years and contributed to the surprising success of Linux-based systems and the resurgence of Apple in the personal computer market. Such seems to be the fate of Verizon.

Verizon has been waging a heavily promoted war on AT&T comparing Verizon's inferior, but larger 3G wireless network to AT&T's smaller, but significantly superior network. What Verizon neglects to mention is that their network does not service that much more of the population than AT&T. Simply put, Verizon may provide service to more sheep in rural Montana than AT&T, but sheep don't carry wireless phones. Sure Verizon has a bigger network. But AT&T has a network where people need it--in cities and suburbs, and along virtually every major highway in the country. AT&T is more people oriented. Verizon builds technology for bragging rights.

Verizon's customer service is oriented to following rules, no matter how ridiculous those rules get in execution. For example, Verizon has the capability for you to view your phone/wireless/Internet/cable bill online. That is a great idea. But what happens when you are unable to access that feature on their site? First, which site. Verizon evidently is two completely separate companies that do not communicate with each other. This is evidenced by the fact they have two separate and independent web sites--verizon.net and verizon.com. Take the example of the online bill. What happens when you log in to verizon.net and and click on a link that states view your bill? You are directed to a link that resides on verizon.com and are asked to log in a second time. When you log in, guess where you are sent? Back to verizon.net. You are in the worst the web has to offer, a web loop, not unlike Verizon's matching phone tree loop.

If you call Verizon's crack customer service personnel--a daunting task since their phone tree selections match nothing related to your problem, the first thing they ask you is your phone number (which you know) and your account number (which is one of those things I suspect most people do not have memorized. Guess where the account number is located? On the online bill you are attempting to view. You are stuck. Verizon will not provide further help unless you provide the account number (for security reasons) and you cannot access the account number because their system is so poorly designed.

This is the future of most technology-oriented companies. As it happens, Verizon (and GTE in their past life) has been getting a free pass for most of their life--they held a regulated monopoly over most of the areas they served. That is quickly changing. People are looking for products that work, things that are easy to locate, and people who are truly helpful. Apple gets it. Verizon does not. AT&T may not quite get it, but I believe they are learning fast. Verizon has probably gotten worse with time. Even Google has the agility to change rapidly. Verizon is the huge dinosaur lumbering along thinking things do not have to change.

A lesson for the future. You can have the most advanced technology, the new and shiniest next new thing. However, if the people cannot easily adapt to that technology, if they are unable to use it, if they are unable to get the support they need, they won't buy it. If they do buy it, they will flee to alternatives once they are available.

Verizon isn't the only company that doesn't get it. Microsoft is in the same boat. HP seems headed that way. That's okay, because losers always can be replaced by winners and new winners are popping up every day.

Cloud Labor

I blogged a while back about a concept called "Pop-Up Organizations," where dynamic, virtual organizations would organize using the Internet in order to deliver a product or service, or otherwise meet a need, and then disband. It was a concept that was predicted in one of the many forecasts that are published each year. Related to that concept is the concept of "cloud labor," where virtual workers come together to address a specific problem or deliver a service via the Internet.

The cloud labor concept was written about in the article, "Innovation: The relentless rise of the digital worker," by Justin Mullins and published January 15, 2010 on the New Scientist Web site. You can read more about it at:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18395-innovation-the-relentless-rise-of-the-digital-worker.html

Needless to say, the pop-up organization is taking form in realtime.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

IBM's Next Five in Five

It's that time of year again. IBM has published their end of 2009 "Next Five in Five," five innovations that will enter the commercial mainstream in the next five years that will have dramatic impact on all our lives. The five:

- We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world

- Real-time speech translation-once a vision only in science fiction-will become the norm

- There will be a 3-D Internet

- Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance

-Our mobile phones will come close to reading our minds

Read the full list at:

http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ideasfromibm/us/five_in_five/010807/index1.shtml

What say you?

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Cellular Phones are Dead; Long Live the Cellular Device

Today (or last night, actually) marks a sea-change in wireless communications: the iPhone Skype application debuted. It is also coming to the Blackberry. Why is this such a disruptive change? Because it represents the final move to data convergence. With the implementation of Skype on cell phones, the voice officially becomes "data." Actually, it has been data since the implementation of digital wireless voice transmission over a decade ago, but Skype represents a transition to cellular communication via Voice-over-Interntet-Protocol (VoIP). With VoIP, a voice call becomes just another Internet connection.

For the short-term, Apple and AT&T are throttling the availablility of Skype to Wi-Fi connections only (not available on EDGE or 3G), but this is only temporary. AT&T may disagree about how temporary it is, but it is temporary. This is because the battle lines have been drawn. AT&T (and by extension, all the other wireless carriers) want to protect their tariffs for charging for voice calls by the minute. The reason is simple; it makes them lots of money. But Skype makes the voice call just another data stream, no different than a song playing on Pandora or a video playing on YouTube. Voice communication becomes bundled with the phone's data plan.

Why this is an issue with the phone company is simple. For the iPhone, the lowest phone plan is $39.99. However, an unlimited data plan is $20.00. Of course, at present AT&T forces you to have both a phone and data plan. Now this is going to change. It is only a matter of time for a company such as Metro PCS to start offering unlimited data/phone plans for a set rate. In the short-term this means that phone plans will decrease in price while data plans increase. In the long-term, there will only be one type of plan--data.

The reason this is a major issue is that carriers make their money off of voice services since they are billed at a higher rate than data. For one thing, they are on a per minute charge (or the user is forced to purchase a group of minutes for a set rate). The carriers like individual rates for voice, SMS, and similar services. For example, of a per minute basis, SMS is the highest cost service on a cellular phone.

With the Skype service, this is going to change--and change disruptively. Already, Skype is the largest carrier of international phone calls. This is not a big deal because AT&T's old Long Lines service has been a decreasing revenue stream for years. Now they are faced with the same thing happening on their wireless phone services. Within the next five years, the wireless companies will be all data services. With this context, it is easy to see why they are looking at metering wireless data. It is their solution to decreasing voice phone revenues.

What do you think?

Netscape Revisited

I wrote a review of Google Chrome--Google's browser entry--back in September, 2008. In it, I described the philosophy behind the browser, and the features provided in the Windows version. With several month's experience and looking at Google Chrome in context with Google's other applications and services, it occurred to me that I was having a deja vu moment. The Google environment reminded me of something similar I had seen or heard about years ago. Then I remembered: Netscape!

Many users today probably don't remember the Netscape browser. However, until a full frontal attack by Microsoft with the introduction and bundling of their Internet Explorer (IE)browser with their Windows operating system, Netscape was the preferred browser for both personal and business use. Indeed, Netscape and their development of HTML seemed to be rapidly making the operating system an afterthought--Netscape would run on a wide variety of operating systems, providing the same user interface and the same functionality. The Internet became primary and the local operating system became secondary. With Netscape incubating this view, it is clear in hindsight why Microsoft took such an aggressive approach to them by developing their own competing browser.

Fast-forwarding a little more than a decade, it can be seen how much has changed and how much things have stayed the same. First, Microsoft won the first battle of the browsers. Indeed, I found an old Web site from 1998 that showed Netscape had 65% of the market while IE had 32%. By January 2002, those statistics had changed to IE 85.8% and ALL other browsers 14.2%. By that time, Netscape was part of AOL and no longer a major force in the market. However, AOL did an interesting thing: They placed the source code for most of Netscape into the open source movement by giving the code to the Mozilla organization. Since it was open source, anyone could use it, work on it, and improve it. With the thousands contributing time, money, and intellectual property to Mozilla, by August, 2008 just before Google Chrome was introduced, IE had 50.5%, Firefox (Mozilla's official browser product) 43.7% and all others 5.8%.
Today, with Google Chrome having been introduced last September, IE has 43.6%, Firefox has 46.4%, Google Chrome has 4%, and all others have 6%. What is astounding about these numbers is that Chrome has gained 4% of the market in just seven months and their browser only runs on Windows. With the release of Chrome to Linux and Mac OS-X later this year, it can be expected that Chrome will grow at an even faster rate.

More importantly, Google Chrome has revived many of the design philosophies of the original Netscape browser. Chrome is the first browser to partition each instance of the browser, whether tab or window. This makes the browser much more stable because instances are independent. It also makes Chrome look more like a user interface tied to an operating environment, one of the original design goals of Netscape. Second, unlike Netscape, Google has developed a broad array of user applications that run in the network cloud and require nothing more than a browser to use. With Chrome, each of these applications can have their own instance of a browser window (or tab) and operate independently. The result is a very sophisticated office system can run in the browser while being operating system independent. Unlike Netscape which had an information portal as its main user application, Google Chrome can support Google Mail, Google Sites, Google Chat, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Sketchup, and Google Apps (Word processor, Spreadsheet, and Slide presentations). The result is Google has created an environment that can provide a consistent interface across virtually any operating system and virtually any device. (While mobile devices are still somewhat problematic, they still have similar access. With the introduction of Android devices and continuing developmental support for Apple's iPhone, the interface will only become more similar.)

What this all means is that while Netscape failed in their original vision, they may have the last laugh on Microsoft. It would appear that Google Chrome is in the right place, with the right product (and a multitude of supporting products and partners developing compatible applications and features), and at the right time. The operating system is becoming secondary to the user interface and the applications accessible through that user interface. With an increasing number of technology companies embracing cloud computing (Google, Amazon, eBay, Salesforce just to name a few), Google Chrome only stands to gain.

What are your thoughts? Your comments and questions are invited.