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Daylight Savings Time: OPEC's Friend
Indiana is home to four important things... Interactive Intelligence, some of the best steaks you will find anywhere, some of the nicest people around and really bizarre daylight savings rules that made it virtually impossible to know what time it was in the state, without the aid of computer.You see, up until 2006, some counties in Indiana implemented daylight savings time while others did not. Thankfully the situation is better now for those who weren't thrilled about dealing with new time zones as they drove through the state.
Interestingly this change allowed researchers to study whether implementing daylight savings time actually saves energy. This is what many of us have been lead to believe. Apparently daylight savings time actually increases energy usage.
Why the increase in energy use? We can thank heaters and air conditioners for this. Also, this article on the matter points out that there are still other benefits to daylight savings time such as improved quality of life due to more hours of sun. There is likely less depression as well because of this simple twice-a-year clock changing exercise.
I am sure OPEC ministers are driving their Ferrari's, wiping themselves with 10,000 euro bills and laughing at us for being the idiots we seem to be.
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Ken Camp is Available
Regular readers of my blog and attendees of TMC expos no doubt know Ken Camp. Ken is very knowledgeable in the field of information technology with special expertise in communications and security. He has written books, articles, spoken at shows and is a recognized thought leader in the blogoshere and beyond.Ken does all this and is also the State Enterprise Architect for the State of Washington -- with a special focus on security.
Ken has impressed me for a number of reasons and perhaps one of the most amazing things he does is travel to industry events on his own dime. He does this because he seems to truly love the industry, being involved with it and sharing his thoughts with others via his books, internet writings and speaking assignmets.
Having said that, Ken is looking to change roles and I can think of few people who are capable as he is.
Ken has also functioned in an applications support role for over 50 account execs and while I am not able to vouch for his sales skills, I can tell you he has been able to build relationships, write and speak for various organizations in the industry who compete with one another while somehow staying in the good graces of all of them.
If I go on any further you will suspect Ken has paid for this post and he hasn't. In fact I even had to twist his arm (slightly) to even blog about his desire to try his hand at something new.
If you do hire Ken, please make one promise... That you will foot the bill to have him participate in ITEXPO and allow him to write for TMC. :)
Here is Ken's resume.
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Yes, Telecom is Broken
You have some good and intriguing thoughts in your blog post which I excerpted from your On Rad's Radar? blog:
From an agent side of telecom, I do think it is broken. So many carriers have merged for survival that the integration was a disaster. The blunder poster child would obviously be Sprint as it wrote off $29.5B on the Nextel merger. Sprint can't get out of its own way. Qwest is looking to jump ship as an MVNO partner. As an agent, I can not get a quote out of Sprint (or Embarq) in any reasonable time frame. Sprint's Board should have hired a consumer exec, like a former C-Level at P&G or Unilever, not some bean counting Bell-head like Hesse (who basically ruined Embarq with his so-called leadership).
Paetec merged with USLEC then McLeod then Allworx. I don't even know how that worked out, but I do know that their CEO will say it is all about the people. (That's his mantra and keynote address. Ho hum). It's actually about the planning and execution done by the talent. A lesson that Level(3) learned during its integration of Broadwing, Progress Telecom, ICG, Looking Glass, and the Savvis CDN. L3 released too many people; people that had valuable knowledge about the systems that they needed to integrate. Oops!
SBC buying AT&T and BellSouth has been no picnic either. And the VZ and MCI merger still has employees and customers alike flummoxed about who to buy from (Verizon or Verizon Business).
Time Warner Telecom bought Xspedius last year. This year it is still trying to figure it out. (Try to get a quote). And TWTC has to change its name by June, since its rights to use "Time Warner" run out. Why didn't TWTC take the Xspedius name and only do the branding and printing thing Once? It seems Bell-heads can only follow what Ma Bell does. (Ma Bell spent Billions on renaming AT&T Wireless TWICE!)
Two CLEC's that did some merging are now kind of quiet. One is One Communications - the result of the merger of CTC, Choice One and Conversent. The other is Broadview Networks, which is in IPO mode after rolling up InfoHighway, ATX and Eureka. I don't know how well the integration went personally, but I don't hear a lot of screaming about it.
Then there's the gang of 5 at the FCC, led by a chairman (Kevin Martin, K-Mart for short), who can't create a level playing field for the players. That's all anyone wants. (See my post on AstroTurf coming up). Deregulate the RBOCs and let them merge, but regulate the cablecos and not only can't cable merge but neither can the DBS companies (DISH and DirecTV) or the satellite radio companies. Verizon must have a person who lives in that building because they file Forbearance petitions and ex-parte almost daily. The FCC's job isn't to make billions selling spectrum to the Fortune 500. The FCC's mandate is to improve radio, TV, and communications, which it has done a poor job of so far as competition in every arena is failing. (And wait for the DTV disaster next year!)
But Peter, regulatory issues aside -- the reason telecom is broken may have to do with the following... In the last few years, the access to capital has been so great that companies merged for the sake of market share like never before. Money flowed as easily in M&A as it did to subprime borrowers.
Just as there seemed to document-free loans for mortgages there also seemed to be logic-free loans for M&A.
Most of the companies doing the acquiring had no business merging as they ran semi-monopolies and they weren't really able to integrate other companies as well as they were able to retain share and grow slowly -- competing with other semi-monopolies. The tech and telecom industries are littered with the corpses of once-great companies acquired by other companies with egos larger than their integration teams.
Only Oracle and Cisco come to mind as companies who know how to acquire well. That is a scary track record and certainly not unique to telecom and tech.
Another major problem telecom faces is Skype. They are 100 billion minutes strong. Granted, not all this traffic was taken off carrier's networks but perhaps 25-50% of it was.
In the last few years, technological change has posed a significant challenge to the telecom and music industries.
Ironically, you might say the music business is broken as well and by the same person since Niklas Zennstrom founded Skype and Kazaa.
I am no expert on record labels but there seems to be a level of technical incompetence in that industry that I have never seen before. If it wasn't for Steve Jobs, music companies might still be searching for a digital solution.
Speaking of Steve Jobs, it is interesting to see Apple changing the way the music industry works and more recently he is starting to do the same for telecom.
I suppose the slower economy you mention may give the companies you cite the the opportunity to figure out who does what and perhaps reorganize in a manner that allows them and agents to understand who does what.
But while one side of the business is certainly experiencing pains brought on by excess consolidation, there are other parts of the industry where innovation is taking off. Consumer electronics, mobile VoIP, hosted VoIP SMB solutions, etc.
It seems to me that agents should look outside their normal areas to new parts of telecom where there may be bigger profits to be had.
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