How to Own the Market
Posted by Josh Klein
We love our cellphones, but we hate cell phone service providers. All of them.
It irks me when I hear about how “our network has less dropped calls” when they drop my calls. They mock “can you hear me now?” as if I don’t actually have to say that.
It’s never a good idea to make your claim to fame, “I’m relatively less sucky than the competition”, especially if you’re still absolutely and totally sucky.
In the last 5 years, cell phone providers have inched forward. They’ve incrementally bested each other with cheaper plans, more minutes, better coverage, subsidized phones, and so on.
What a screw up. Any one of those companies has had the opportunity to blast the competition out of the water by skipping the incremental and jumping the curve.
What if there was a cell phone provider that had given us what we have today, but 5 years ago? They’d own the market, we’d love them, and we’d be much closer to a consumer-friendly marketplace today.
Same technology. Same infrastructure. Stupid business decisions.
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4 Responses
We have to assume the technology is moving as fast as it can and that providers do want to give their clients better service. With a technical breakthrough, a provider would trump the competition, garner more market share. But here’s where I think cell phone providers are going in the wrong direction. They should cooperate with each other, not compete. Cell phone service is reputedly better in Western European countries, where government regulation enforces cooperation through a single network and common standards.A similar approach might help bring American cell phone service up to Western European standards. Communication networks are natural monopolies; the government should work to make them fair to all participants, provider and consumer alike.
I disagree that the technology is moving as fast as it can - Japan’s cellphones and cell network infrastructure vastly out paces that of the U.S.
But my real point is that yes, the providers do want to give better client service, but their cost-benefit analysis leads them to only slowly improve, marginally beating the competition.
What if they rigorously trained each customer service rep for twice as long as they do now? Probably too expensive (so say the short-sighted business analysts), but what an effect that would have!
I’m not sure that technology isn’t moving as fast as it can in light of the circumstances American telecom infrastructure finds itself in today. Japan modernized so quickly for two reasons- the lack of massive amounts of telephone wiring (acting as a deterrent to technical innovation), and the Japanese comparative advantage in microtech. There’s a reason Japan has better cell phones, cars, and dongles for their tech: inflexible capital flow/brain drain. We don’t want that sort of growth….at least, relative to the growth we do want.
Interesting. Thanks, Jim!