There are 2.5 billion smartphones on the planet now, according to Ben Evans.
"China now has 656 million internet users. Brazil trails only the US in total Facebook, Twitter and YouTube users, and the country has more mobile devices than human inhabitants." [TCrunch]
Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are 3x the scale of WinTel. Not just giants in tech, but giants in the economy as well. More so than IBM or WinTel. [mobile is eating the world]
Machine learning and AI are getting exponentially better each year.
Facebook has between 15-20% of mobile time. And smartphone apps are 60% of all time spent online in USA.
With Amazon Alexa and Google Home (and other voice activated search), what does that do to your SEO or PPC campaigns?! POOF!
There are "nearly 3.8 billion internet users worldwide, almost 2.8 billion are active on social media." The most popular social networks "as of January 2017, based on global traffic figures for unique monthly visitors, shows: Facebook (with 1.1 billion), YouTube (with 1 billion), Twitter (with 310 million), LinkedIn (with 255 million), Pinterest (with 250 million) and Google+ (with 120 million)." [channel partners]
"Cisco and DHL, the world's largest logistics provider, estimated last year that $1.9 trillion dollars of economic value could be created by the use of IoT devices and asset tracking solutions in the global supply chain and logistics sector." [business insider]
NOAA has a new satellite "GOES-16 has four times the image resolution of the existing Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) fleet." See images here.
SIDE NOTE:
That said, people who blame increased connectivity for widening ideological divides misunderstand what's going on. The world is not getting worse, nor are our divisions deepening. We've always had these problems - it's just that connectivity is bringing them to light. Racism, xenophobia, bigotry and sexism have always been there, it's just that we can see them more clearly now. This unprecedented, radical form of transparency feels scary and dark, because it forces us to look long and hard into the corners. But that's also why connectivity is so important. Billions of people are starting to speak out, and that means we are no longer able to claim ignorance, and filter out the terrible things that have happened on the watch of good people in the past. Welcome to the world as it really is, and not the way the gatekeepers used to tell us it was. It's about time. [Future Crunch 30]]]>
In UC&C (and most software) "CIOs will be buying into the customer experience and not the technology," writes RingCentral's Sahil Rekhi."In 2017, CIOs will be buying communication solutions with a focus on experiences rather than technology; removing distinctions between communication, collaboration and productivity. Workplace communication and collaboration tools in the cloud will be made to create a unified and consistent experience across multiple devices, moving businesses away from a siloed approach to communications." Most ITSPs are not set up for the complete mobile experience yet, let alone a full UC&C CX (customer experience).
There are providers still trying to add analytics to call logs. Because we are still stuck on replacement instead of impact, outcome or experience. (One reason that Slack took off: UX!)
GOOD READS:
Fred Wilson's frank look at what will happen in 2017.
Start the new year with better sales meetings HERE.
PR trends in 2017. Content versus Attention versus Influencers = Viewers running away to the "Dark Social", "the amount of communication which occurs behind closed doors and messaging apps and private groups."
Sales Hacker's Top 10 Trends & Predictions Heading Into 2017.
This is a twofer: 5 lessons from the book LinkedIn's head of recruiting recommends to all new managers is a summary of Ryan Holiday's book.
Are you hiring? Good read on what to look for. I always say Attitude first, but this CEO says have a meal with the candidate and look for Gratitude and excitement.
MEDIA PAIN
Medium has laid off one-third its staff. Medium is a blogging/media platform founded by the same guy who founded Blogger, Odeo and twitter. He is having an issue with business models as the world of the Internet is based on free. No idea why he didn't try charging $9.99 per year per reader or some other nominal amount. It isn't a volume shop like Huffington or Buzzfeed. It has a targeted audience. But that is the problem: everyone uses the model that they see, not one designed specifically for their product.
As Seth Godin pointed out, "Newspapers won Pulitzer prizes for telling us things we didn't want to hear. We've responded by not buying newspapers any more." That is why we have click-bait, fake news, struggling newspapers and uneducated voters. It is all about the pageview, even in this content marketing world. Go figure!
RETAIL SUFFERS!
Sears is closing 150 more stores. Macys is closing stores. Retail had a bad holiday season - and the stock market is unforgiving. American Apparel is BK (and Amazon is trying to buy it.) Retail has to change. Big time. Also, malls have to re-think what they are to consumers.
Fast food is hiring robots and self-serve kiosks; retail is tanking. What will teenagers do for employment? What will many others do for employment in place of managers, buyers, maintenance, etc.
Ford is staying. Carrier is staying but they got tax breaks and other bonuses to do so. And they are going to automate those jobs out of existence. AI is replacing some fund managers. If you can't fix or code a robot, what will you do for a job?
]]>One big story was Google Fiber laying off and the CEO quitting. I tend to agree with Beranek on this: Google didn't want to be a network operator. They just wanted to scare the Duopoly into building out broadband networks, so that Google could get more page views a la YouTube.
People don't understand how much obstruction the Duopoly has in telecom. From lobbying to lawsuits, the phone and cable companies hate competition. They do everything they can NOT to compete. So given an upstart - Google Fiber or Covad or a muni network proposal - they go to town throwing up hurdles to success. Big is Bad for Consumers. Period.
The Election: Not getting political but it looks like Net Neutrality will be rolled back. Soon the 4 cellcos will make it look like 1996 again when it was Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe and DELPHI. Walled gardens are coming back. This will make it harder for any new entrants to get a foothold.
Devices: It was the year of device panic from Samsung's blowing up to Apple eliminating the earphone jack. Add in the mix, the hacking of the IOT devices used for DDoS attacks against Krebs and DYN. It was 100K hacked cameras and DVRs that took down the Internet in October. It is only going to get worse. For a society obsessed with guns, why don't we protect our information and devices? The Info War is going to set you back.
BTW, did you see that Quest Diagnostics was hacked? 34,000 accounts. Would you want your medical history online?
It was the year of hacks. Just ask the DNC.
Hacks and outages all year.
A lot of noise about Fake News (true), self-driving cars (almost) and SD-WAN (soon).
It was the Year of Uber. Of all the ride sharing apps including Lyft, Uber seemed to dominate. Close to 25 ride sharing apps have been funded to date, but it is Uber that leads the race, despite famous battles with cities around the globe.
VR got bigger (just as Scoble!) But like Augmented Reality, other than entertainment and early adopters I have no idea who is paying attention.
IOT was big. Everyone is still trying to figure it out. Or more precisely figure out how to monetize it for themselves.
Speaking of which, IAAS has blown up with one clear winner, AWS. At $13 Billion in revenue, it is all of the profit that Amazon shows. Rackspace, a rival, went private this year when a private equity firm acquired them for $4.3B. Like Dell, going private allows them time to pivot without the stock market beating them up. And speaking of Dell and pivots, what a year they had buying and selling. If the smoke ever settles in Austin, it will be an interesting story.
Artificial Intelligence is something I tend to think of as analytics and data mining. (We went from Big Data to AI.) From Siri to Alexa to IBM Watson, AI is entrenching in our world. A doctor friend uses Dragon Speak Medical Edition to transcribe his notes into the EHR system. That's the kind of tech we need.
Microsoft added its Skype real time translation service to cell phones and landline. In a global economy, this will be a game changer. And this is on top of Skype4B crashing past 50 million seats.
What else did we see a lot of? UC&C or UCaaS. So much of it. But when you have 2000+ companies plus thousands of resellers trying to gain some ground, the noise level will go up. Most of that noise is pure hype, spin and hullabaloo. More on that in another post.
Is there anything I missed? Is there something you are watching? Let me know.
]]>CenturyLink just sold off its data center business that was a combo of Qwest Cyber Centers and SAVVIS to a group of PE firms for $2.15B in cash and C-Link keeps a minority stake worth $150M in the new company. CL bought Savvis for $2.5B in 2011. Buy High; Sell Low. Bell-Head Mentality.
The PE coalition that bought the data centers also grabbed 4 cyber-security firms in order to announce this global security co, to be run by Manny Medina, former CEO of Terremark Worldwide.
Wired's headline says it best: The World's Telecoms Are Under Threat From All Sides.
Broadband, cellular and voice are all flat or declining markets.
IAAS and PAAS are ruled by Amazon, IBM and Google. Microsoft only got into the game recently and is doing better than all the telco's combined.
PE firms are buying up data centers as the world adjust to cloud computing, an app market and streaming TV and radio.
DDoS attacks are happening too often. So are Hacks. There are not enough fingers to fill all the holes in this dyke.
UCaaS is ruled by 8x8, Vonage Business, RingCentral, Fuze and a bunch of other providers that are not a telco. The PBX market may be shrinking but not fast enough for the other Hosted VoIP players. Cisco and Microsoft have chunks of the enterprise UCaaS business that the telcos don't.
Comcast Business is at $6B in annual revenue, which makes it a bigger CLEC than almost all that are left. WIND does $5B. EarthLink less than $1B. Birch and TelePacific are private. Level3 does $8B. CenturyLink does $17B (much of it ILEC revenue). Zayo is $2B.
Apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype and Slack are replacing voice and SMS and even email. It is a topsy-turvy world. What's a telco to do? Well, merge! Get bigger because bigger solves nothing, but it makes money for top execs in the C-Suite and the Board room and on Wall Street.
Our economy spins on e-commerce and the Internet. When the companies that provide that Internet are too clunky to do it properly, what happens to our economy?
We went from a five nines voice network of reliability to cell phones and VoIP that quite frankly can't be more than three nines. Have you noticed the number of outages lately by telcos and cablecos?
There is a lot going on. There are many areas of opportunity, but the fall back from these guys is "more of the same", "do what I know" and "one more quarter!". None of these transactions is good for the industry, the economy or the consumers. They are stop gap, short term money movers. We are going to wake up shortly and realize that it is 1970 all over again. It makes the NSA job easier when there are few players, but what about the customers?
In the data center space, one master agency contacted me after the C-Link announcement to tell me that the folks at CenturyLink have no details about the sale. How can that be when Monroe has been trying to sell the DC division all year? Great planning, guys!
Whose customer is it? Will the agent still get paid? Will the customer see a price increase? Who is the billing entity? Who will the customer be paying? These are good questions that bothered some TELX customers when Digital Realty took over.
I keep seeing executives at master agencies say these deals are good. Do they say that in print because they have to?
Don't forget that you can leave a public comment with the FCC on any of these mergers. You can voice your opinion here. You will need a docket number but you can google it after the filings are in the system.
]]>I wonder back to when AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile in 2011. That Obama Admin said NO. Despite the fact that AT&T was actively helping the NSA and other 3-letter agencies since before 2006, when Klein exposed Room 641A.
Then there is the other program that AT&T runs for the feds: "Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud." The Daily Beast explains how AT&T is spying on Americans for profit. (It would be weirder if they were just doing it for fun.)
Barry Eisler spells out how all this works via his "fictional" book God's Eye View.
AT&T has hedged its bets since the T-Monile No. It won approval for DirecTV. It plans to get a Yes from the DOJ - and has told the FCC that they don't have a say in this acquisition.
From NEXTDRAFT by Dave Pell: "Will the AT&T acquisition of TimeWarner get federal approval? Before you place your bet, consider this data provided by the NYT: "AT&T is the biggest donor to federal lawmakers and their causes among cable and cellular telecommunications companies, with its employees and political action committee sending money to 374 of the House's 435 members and 85 of the Senate's 100 members this election cycle."
Why are they buying TW? Well, to catch up to VZ and Comcast. And because all the pies are flat. AT&T had a bad quarter. VZ has a had a couple. They are laden with debt. Cellular which is half the revenue or more is being picked apart by T-Mobile and to a much smaller extent Sprint. Cable is eating the wireline broadband lunch*. Since all of the bets were on cellular, it is now a run to use fixed wireless (LTE or licensed) for broadband deployment which will increase ARPU for them -- and the bills to consumers.
Ma and Pa Bell have spent tens of billions on spectrum. They will use it to get out of terrestrial broadband and have everything be wireless. They will still have to figure out the T-Mobile problem as well as the cable wi-fi problem.
They want content to build a walled garden - like Facebook or AOL before them. When you own the content you can be king, just ask Comcast/NBCU or Disney.
The one thing that will kill off the telco is an economic depression. When the US experiences another economic slowdown - like say 3Q2017 - consumers will have a lot less money to spend. That means ARPU will not go - and subscriber counts will go down. When you have to eat, you skip HBO and cable TV.
The auto industry is already feeling this crunch. More leasing, less sales, more discounts, interest free loans. The cars last longer. And driverless cars are coming.
One reason for immigration is to actually increase the population of the US. Millennials aren't having kids - in many cases because student loan debt and poor salaries make a child too expensive, except by accident.
In the midst of this noise 2 things to note: (1) ABRY is selling Masergy to Berkshire Partners for about $1 Billion dollars. The reports say $900M; I was told it is more than that.
(2) Google Fiber is laying off. The CEO of Google Access, Craig Barratt, is also stepping down. Too few subscribers, too many hassles means they will try fixed wireless then probably call it a day. The Duopoly of cable and telco have successfully squashed competition. And for all the little guys cheering, it could be you next!
Please note that in the middle of all this, despite the skyrocketing analyst forecasts, cloud computing is not mentioned in this scenario. Why? It amounts to peanuts in revenue for the Duopoly. "Total SaaS/PaaS revenues of top 50 software companies globally are $22.4B. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Symantec, EMC, VMWare, HP, Salesforce and Intuit are the top ten software companies worldwide," according to Fortune and PWC. Unless they were to buy Salesforce to gain $5.5Billion in revenue, they have to go content. Microsoft bought LinkedIN for $26B!! And LI revenue isn't even $4B dollars.
IOT isn't even a billion dollars in revenue for VZW yet. So how do you move the revenue needle at the former Bells?
* Per telecompetitor, "The number of U.S. fixed broadband subscribers dropped by nearly 200,000 on a net basis in 2Q 2016, a decline of 0.2 percent, according to the latest market data from Point Topic."
]]>We went from TDM to VoIP to Hosted PBX to UCaaS to UC&C.
We went from T1 to cable broadband to Gigabit.
The consolidation of cable will tighten the market in 15 to 18 months. (It takes that long for integrations to take hold.) Now if the integrations are not a big fail, then cable - New Charter/Spectrum, Comcast, Altice - will ratchet up the competition in the small business market for triple play.
"Cable/MSOs are the fastest growing providers in the business services market, with much of their recent success in the mid-size business space," reported MarketResearch. Think about that: the mid-sized space - not just the small business segment of the market.
Of the $104 Billion total businesses spent on telecom services in the US in 2014, AT&T had the largest share (33%), followed by Verizon (22%) and the rest of the LEC band of brothers (Level3, CenturyLink, Sprint, Windstream). MSOs have more than $12 Billion of that pie, with the lion share - $5B - going to Comcast coffers alone.
SIP anyone? 54% of business cable subscribers also use cable for voice, the report states. That means less than half the businesses using cable are buying voice from another provider. That is a shrinking opportunity for the 2000 Hosted VoIP players in the US.
"Last year the Cable/MSO share of businesses with 100+ employees rose to 17%, reports TNS. "The main driver behind this growth was a heavier reliance on internet service and the need for greater bandwidth; two areas where larger cable providers excel."
Telco broadband has not kept pace with cable in speed and price. Egged on by Google Fiber - and a declining market share of businesses - ILECs have started tentatively rolling out faster fiber based broadband - 100MB to 1Gigabit depending on the ILEC (Windstream versus CenturyLink or AT&T).
UPDATE: Google just rolled out Gigabit Fiber to small business starting in Charlotte in July of 2016.
The ILECs have made a tremendous CAPEX investment in TV - just as OTT TV is hitting its stride. They spent big to supply triple-play, when they could have spent the money on FTTx projects for faster bandwidth. That was just uncreative thinking. [More of that Me-too mentality ingrained in telco.]
All of this will stress ILECs, some CLECs and even some OTT VoIP players. When cable takes about 35% of the SMB market, there won't be much room left for anyone else.
In March of 2016, "During the fourth quarter, Verizon reported that total broadband connections dropped to 2.1 million as it lost more DSL subscribers after losing 94,000 DSL customers," according to Fierce media.
Verizon is transitioning. Verizon is now betting on mobile ads (AOL acquisition and Yahoo bid); 5G fixed wireless broadband replacement for wireline services; and IoT (including connected cars) to add to its coffers.
A point I make often is that the debt that the ILECs carry is crippling with flat revenues.
Think about this: Vonage has taken $800M worth of voice revenue. Twilio gets $240 million in voice revenue. This is revenue that typically would go to Level3, Verizon and AT&T (and it probably does terminate to them eventually for a smaller percentage of that money).
WebRTC is being used in so many apps to allow for video and voice calls - bypassing the traditional voice network. [And bypassing the cellco text system and dollars.]
Then, we have Cable beating Telco in broadband bandwidth. Always has in fact. Gigabit fiber will be the real winner if the telcos decide to pursue that route for real (versus in just press releases).
We have telco getting in the data center - and now we have telcos looking to get out of that business without embarrassment.
There is a Talent problem, too. There are too many musical chairs. Not only can't you set a strategy when you shift personnel that much, you can't execute on a strategy either if the cogs are constantly being replaced. (And I don't mean cogs in a bad way. It takes a lot of talent to keep the wheels spinning.) The talent drain has also resulted in a domain knowledge drain as well. Quite frankly that means they don't where things are and how things have been done to keep things working. It isn't all documented, especially fiber maps!
Let's face it, for many companies that started with an A Team, they are now running with a B or C team. Why? As Steve Jobs said, "A Players hire A Players, B players hire C players. Get it?"
People move from company to company in teams. The same routine and team may work once, but it is not often a repeatable experience. There's a reason the Cavaliers recruited LeBron back to Cleveland - and didn't hire the whole Miami Heat starting line up.
The telco organizations harbor stifling factors: monopoly mindset, legacy systems, federal accounting and regulations, departmental silos and competing internal interests. These factors do not lend themselves to attracting more A Players.
There is also a surprising lack of talent for the new services and skills needed for omni-channel marketing; omni-channel customer service; cloud, managed services, migration and integration. This lack of skill will choke growth and brands.
We see outages and hacks every day. The worry is only about getting a customer. There is little concern for retaining that customer; data security; or a resilient network (4 Nines is good enough).
Many people are choosing smaller organizations to work for. The reasons are numerous but I would think that impact and voice play a major part. In smaller businesses, any one person can have a voice and can see the impact that they are having on customers, culture, and the company. That isn't the case in larger organizations.
Flat organizations (and smaller companies) have less meetings, fewer silos, maybe more transparent governance.
Most financial experts are predicting an economic slump in 2017. It won't matter which candidate wins the Presidential election, a slump is coming. We have under-employment; increasing number of freelancers; and a stagnant wage. None of these components inspire an economic engine that is fueled by consumer spending.
ARPU for cellular, cable and VoIP segments have been fairly constant over the last 4 years worth of data I could find. Bandwidth and voice revenues are actually shrinking. Total telecom spending from 2013 to 2014 shrunk $6 Billion dollars according to MarketResearch.
Growth will be hard to find. We are seeing a price war in cellular accompanied by escalating customer acquisition costs.
Hosted VoIP is experiencing a similar battle for customers that is increasing the cost of customer acquisition. Rising SPIFFs and other compensation are being used to grab both market share and channel partner attention.
PBX vendors are NOT crashing and burning as many had predicted. Premise PBXs are still being sold and installed by a robust band of vendors - Mitel, Shortel, Avaya, 3CX, Fonality, Zultys, Panasonic, NEC, Siemens and more.
We are half way through 2016. No big winners. The Twilio IPO was a surprise. Vonage spending all of its acquisition money for the year on Nexmo, Twilio's competitor, seemed strange, since there were Broadsoft clients they could have picked off instead to take a big step forward in the race. Slack and all the Skype4B hype are little surprises.
2016 is half over - and so many companies have either done M&A or played musical chairs that I expect nothing magical to happen in the rest of 2016. And I look at all of this and wonder what 2017 holds.
ASIDE: telco versus cable consumer data.
]]>The music industry died in 5 years. Blame it on Napster, but it was more about the Kingpins not wanted to change. Movies and TV are facing this, but seem to be adjusting better than the music industry did.
Newspapers blame Google and so much else on the fact that they just didn't want to figure out a service model. What they need is a newspaper subscription service like Rhapsody for Music or Amazon Prime for News. Micro-payments that get you into a dozen or so news outlets. Not enough people are going to subscribe to one newspaper, especially when the news is free on another site. If a bunch of newspapers got together, they could make it work. The Tribune Co or the Garnett company or Ziff-Davis or Time-Warner just haven't gotten out of the old product line thinking. It isn't about Time magazine. It is about the entire catalog. Just a thought.
CB Insights has this article about the 62 start-ups picking apart the hotel industry. AirBnB is Number 1. But once the hotels loose conventions, then it is over for hotels. Sites like eVenues and more events taking place at non-hotel locations will have an impact. [And when you pay $38 topark for a night in Atlanta, you start re-thinking that whole downtown hotel thing.]
Much of it is arbitrage. Uber and AirBnb are effective because (a) people need to earn more money and (b) people want to save money, even in the face of the uncertainty. That is arbitrage. It killed the long distance business.
Craigslist's free ads killed the classified business. Arbitrage.
When I mention innovation, I don't mean buy LinkedIn. I mean, adjust to the new sharing economy.
When Slack comes along and hits 2 million users daily in 24 months, any responsible executive in the UCaaS space HAS to investigate that. Use it. Try it. Incorporate some of that into your next version. Or lose.
The big problem that most software faces is that it is not as easy or as good as the iOS. That was what prompted Consumerization of IT and BYOD. This created havoc in the business world. All because most software deployments suck, fail, and are not adopted by users.
In this autopsy of the failure of Coin, Product Risk is big, which is why you need a Product Manager, someone who owns the product and is driving it to be competitive, relevant to its users, easy to use and more. Most products lack a Product Manager.
Newspapers lack more than a Product Manager. They lack a business model. They lack utilizing technology. Why is there a single front page? When I login why isn't it more like Amazon or Google News - and by that I mean relevant to me? Why aren't they curating stories along with social media like Storify? The St. Pete Times does an epic job when chasing a Pulitzer - like here, just a beautiful Medium-like layout for the story.
It seems we are all in a race for revenue, but forgot that to make and keep a customer, you have to offer a product that they want, trust and use.
]]>Frontier says that the 30K people affected by the transition (and who still have issues) will get credits and should get over it as 30K represents less than 1% of their customers. The Florida Attorney General jumped on the PR bandwagon to wag her finger at Frontier. When you deregulate phones and then give a pass on an acquisition like this, you can't do more than wag a finger.
Sprint just remembered that they have a fiber network. It only generates about $600M in revenue for them currently - about the same as the revenue VZW makes on IOT.
This is offbeat: The FCC issued an Order ($100K fine) resolving a call completion investigation involving inContact.
Evolve IP took a majority investment from a private equity firm, Great Hill Partners. It is a cash infusion for growth and ramping up. " The Company's services are currently deployed in four continents and 15 countries, to more than 1,300 commercial business accounts with more than 100,000 users, licensed seats and managed end points." This investment makes it a little harder for someone like Vonage to scoop up Evolve IP.
Vonage spent most of its acquisition fund buying twilio's biggest competitor, Nexmo for $230 Million. This is CPaaS, communications platform as a service space that Twilio has owned. This is the elastic VoIP space. It will be the fourth platform that VB will be running, which is an expensive proposition. It is a business more like wholesale VoIP Orig/Term than it is about retail VoIP, which is Vonage's bread and butter. This begs the question how do their salespeople sell this versus UCaaS? Two entirely different businesses.
Diane Meyers at IHS released their Top 10 UCaaS players scorecard: 8x8, Vonage, West, RingCentral, Mitel, Verizon, Star2Star, Broadview Networks, Fuze and Nextiva. 600K seats puts you at the top of the heap. "Landing just outside the top 10 were Comcast, ShoreTel, Cox, CoreDial and Windstream."
Lenovo gets into the UCaaS space with the launch of its "Smart Meeting Room Solution, essentially a unified communications offering which allows various devices and screens to be able to collaborate in a workplace... The solution combines Lenovo's ThinkCentre Tiny desktop with Intel's Unite software."
Streaming video is a big thing for Live events like Blab, FB Live, Periscope and others Rich Tehrani takes a look at it here. Note: no telecom companies are in this space.
Telcos in the US and UK are not making enough SaaS sales. A majority of the SMB cloud revenue is going to the SaaS providers themselves, according to a report.
The Digital Divide is real: Broadband service tends to stop at the poverty line in the US.
The FCC approved Globalstar's spectrum for wi-fi. They want to create a nationwide wi-fi service and charge for it. No idea if the radios in devices can utilize it. Google of course despises this plan.]]>
From James Altucher: "Automation is eating the world. Every time a line of software is written, a job is lost." VR, 3D printing, AI and robotics will make us all unemployed soon. what then?
Sports Authority is closing all its stores. Macy's, Sears, K-Mart and B&N have been closing stores for a couple of years now. Retail - even luxury retail - is declining. Not all of it is online shopping. In the future, what do malls look like? Basically entertainment and food courts.
Dollar stores are taking share away from even Wal-Mart.
The rise of the minimum wage is supposedly a problem for business owners, but all of the complainers have cash stockpiled and executive pay has flourished. Hmmmm... The amount of money available to keep the economy spinning is lagging.
We have an economy that runs on two elements: service (consumer spending) and technology/The Internet. [Good read here by Dixon on the Internet Economy]
As most businesses and consumers consume the Internet, the number of subscription services we pay for is increasing. Our monthly spends are going up with our bandwidth consumption.
The number of contractors or freelancers has increased to more than 35% in the US. As that keeps increasing imagine what happens to annual income, stability, savings, retirement...
I will just leave it there.
Research on the brain is cool. What words do to your brain HERE.
Two things that people talk about are ecosystems and blockchains. These are two systems that investors look for in startups.
"Consumers don't hate advertising; they dislike how the advertising is distributed." "According to an April 2016 report by Accenture, 84% of digital consumers complain that advertising too frequently interrupts their content consumption, 40% plan to remove these interruptions either via paid subscription or ad blocking software in the next twelve months." from mynfo, a Tampa startup that just closed $6.8 million in Series A financing!
Most business models - newspapers, magazines, car companies, schools, VARs - have not changed much in the last 20 years. So as change comes (not IF, but WHEN that change comes) it will disrupt most of the players.
Rovi Buys TiVo in $1.1 Billion Deal. Is Roku next?
Verizon's brand is taking big hits due to 3 things: (1) the strike; (2) vandalism of systems creating big outages; and (3) Frontier taking over a large chunk of FiOS customers. Frontier's take over was a cluster, like every other take over has been. What shocked me the most is how few people outside the industry actually knew that Verizon had sold off its assets to Frontier. Even fewer knew that Bright House was being bought by Charter. Telecom is at the very bottom of what people think about.
Already seeing UC providers moving away from Polycom since the merger announcement with Mitel. Fuze/thinkingphones went with Yealink. Birch is hollering about Panasonic. A few smaller players are testing out Grandstream. The move away from Polycom has started. Add in a move to softphones and mobile apps and what is MITEL buying?
Sangoma launched a line of phones for FreePBX and its newly launched PBXact UC, a premise based UC&C appliance.
"I never expected to witness the slow suicide of a country, a civilization. I suppose nobody does." [The author is talking about Venezula] "Hate, as a political strategy. Law, used to divide and conquer. Regulation used to punish. Elections used to cement dictatorship. Corruption bleeding out the lifeblood in drips, filling the buckets of a successive line of bureaucrats before they are destroyed, only to be replaced time and again." <- sound familiar?
]]>Cisco buys Jasper Tech for $1.4 billion, because Jasper's IoT cards are inside GM cars, vending machines and car charging stations.
The number of IoT developers is growing exponentially - "According to VisionMobile's new IoT Megatrends 2016 report, 4.5 million developers are working on IoT applications." According to TechRepublic, these developers are buying into revenue, not hype. Well, I would beg to differ as noted by the shift away from Wearables. I think even programmers follow the hype, then when the money isn't there move on. To me some of this feels like PowerBall lottery: play now, gamble some money (time and sweat) for a chance to be a millionaire.
The Lottery Economy is best explained by NYU Professor Scott Galloway in this very good 16 minute video.
Conferencing
Robert Scoble demos Speakeasy conferencing. It is an 18 minute demo, which is way too long. Well thought out features from a user perspective. Only iOS mobile app, but for folks like my brother who have replaced their laptop with a phablet, it will be great. Craig Walker and UberConf have some competition.
I shared this with my clients: West's study on How Companies are Using Collaboration Solutions - An Infographic Examining the Status of Unified Communications in the Workplace.
For channel partners, I will mention this again: there IS $$ in conferencing. PGi was acquired by private equity firm, Sirus Capital, for $1 Billion! PGi is a pure play conferencing company.
VoIP Phones
I don't know if it is the competition from other phone manufacturers - like Yealink, Grandstream, Mitel/Aastra, Sangoma, OBIhai, Panasonic and others - or if it is the fact that many desk phones are being replaced with headsets (winners here are Jabra, Sennheiser and Plantronics), but Polycom revenue is in decline.
Channel Management
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]]>I tend to agree with many of her points.
We live in an age of disruption. "Companies today can turn ideas into reality in a fraction of the time it took just five or 10 years ago."
"In order to thrive in this new era, enterprises must build flexible IT infrastructures, find valuable insights in data, proactively deal with cyber threats, and provide rich digital experiences anytime, anywhere and on any device."
We are caught in a world of apps that resemble the days of AOL and Prodigy, online services that were walled gardens. That evolved with the advent of Netscape and the world wide web to a richer experience that only grew when the connection speed grew. Then we simplified it back to apps. It is always a pendulum swinging.
Mainframe computing and dumb terminals gave way to smart terminals called PC's. Now the smart devices are back to talking to the mainframes (cloud computing). Pendulum swings.
The next evolution will be integration of these apps with other stuff. I don't mean bloatware. I mean like the way Uber connects all the pieces together for taxi service, but also for delivery and courier service. I am guessing that Amazon and grocery stores - andDrizley - are looking for ways to leverage UPS, Fedex, Postal Service and Uber to deliver same day and cost effectively. Scale it and stack it.
We were promised single sign-on in the 1990s. With Google/Facebook sign-on, it is getting closer, but it would be nice at work to log into one browser window and have most of your work environment and apps right there. It is coming... slowly.
Today, we are trapped in a world of desk phones pulling us one way and cloud pulling us another. This is just one hurdle.
Most businesses are living with just one foot in the cloud world. Change is a challenge for all businesses - and people. However, cloud is about change. It is about flexibility, opportunity, productivity and even some negativity, like breaches, down-time, and learning new procedures.
Master Agents talk about "being born to cloud". I wrote about Net-Head versus Bell-Head in 2011. It took the industry four years to catch on.
Seth Godin talks about the Connection Economy. "The internet is a connection machine. Virtually every single popular web project (eBay, Facebook, chat, email, forums, etc.) exists to create connections between humans that were difficult or impossible to do before the web.," writes Godin.
We sell that connection, that platform for connection.
Next, we are selling the Idea Machine. The platform for integration, for idea generation, for turning those ideas into reality.
"We're now living in an Idea Economy where success is defined by the ability to turn ideas into value faster than your competition." - Meg Whitman, Chief Executive Officer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
What are you selling when you are in front of a business talking about cloud? You are selling the promise of competitiveness. That the platform allows for communication with employees, customers, partners -- and it allows for collaboration. The platform should help the HR department hire; the sales teams to sell; the customer care team to service.
You can't do that having a conversation about the number of phone lines and the number of desk phones. The conversation has to get smarter for change to happen.
]]>Comcast Xfinity, Verizon, Boingo, DISH (Sling TV) have joined Hulu, HBO, Starz, and CBS with streaming TV services. It will all move to IP -- not necessarily over the Internet. Netflix has been trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to be treated like a cable channel on cable networks. WOW accepted the challenge.
On Sunday morning, Yahoo exclusively streamed an NFL game from the UK. Yahoo paid $17 million for the privilege and had about 13.5 million unique visitors. The experience had mixed reviews. "Why, it's almost as if people were using different connections, technologies, hardware and transit routes to connect to the same source! Interestingly, the stream appeared to fare much better for set top (Roku, etc.) and mobile devices than it did for traditional browsers, though I've yet to see a comprehensive explanation why," reported DSLR.
I find it interesting that the Roku is a common denominator in these deals (not Cisco).
Roku allows consumers to (1) own the set-top box; (2) save money (as much as $10.95 per month on set-top box rental); and (3) one portal for all TV choices. This may be the wave of the future; moreso than the Internet TV due to the ease of updates to the Roku.
NPR has a story about cable nevers and cable cord cutters. It seems the big reason is money.
We are in the midst of a fight for the middle class, a living wage, et al. What gets lost in that over and over is that our economy is based on service industries. Look at any major thoroughfare in the US: it contains grocery stores, dry cleaners, restaurants, drugstores, coffee shops, etc. RETAIL and SERVICE. This only works if consumers have disposable income. Income has been flat for a long time (while expenses have increased).
Henry Ford knew it. Today's CEOs do not get it.
I have always looked at financial reports thinking that most companies have peaked organically. VISA, Mastercard, NFL, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon. Without inorganic moves, these companies have peaked and the revenues have one way to go: down.
Take Sprint for example. Softbank dumped like $20 Billion into Sprint. It is losing ground to T-Mobile. It never got close to Ma and Pa Bell (ATT, VZW). Now it is in cost cutting mode. Organic sales/growth just have not happened for Sprint. So revenues go slip, sliding away.
"Every industry and every organization will have to transform itself in the next few years. Every industry and every organization needs to transform itself...or fade away." - Tim O'Reilly
"The pace of change is unprecedented--and staggering. ... From a business--and, for that matter, government--perspective there is, in a sense, only one overarching strategy: constant, high-speed innovation." - Tom Peters
]]>Most of that increase is due to about 5 companies charging a premium for content -- and packaging channels that no one wants with the 1 channel viewers do want. [That is why a la carte channels will just not work. And it tops out with ABC/ESPN/Disney corp charging $6 per subscriber for ESPN - and the cableco has to carry all 7 ESPN channels.]. But not all of it!
"According to the latest annual survey by Leichtman Research Group, 83% of U.S. households subscribe to cable, down from 87% in 2010." [Yahoo]
It won't be Netflix or VZ's new mobile go90 video service that kills TV. It will be 2 things: (1) Millennials can't afford it or don't find value in traditional pay TV; and (2) TV ad spending is declining at a rate of 3% pr year, according to WP.
Why do you see the same ads ad nauseum on TV? Fewer advertisers spending fewer bucks on ads. That model can't last for long. The content providers are used to making money on cable carriage fees as well as on ad revenue. These stodgy companies are slow to change - and adopt to what is happening in the marketplace. They are slower learners than the music industry who got Napster-ed; the movie industry that made claims that piracy was killing them (not that they were making crappy movies not worthy of the substantial movie date bill); and the newspaper industry. Who will TV blame for this one?
The flat disposable income of two-thirds of US consumers makes me worry. The US of A is built on a service economy that is kept spinning by consumer spending - even if that consumer spending is credit card, student loans and other types of debt.
But the woes of TV have more to do with the shift in ad spending by companies from TV to the Internet. Notice that even YouTube has a bunch of ads that look an awful lot like TV ads. Mobile video consumption is rising. All of that will have an effect on the current pay-TV ecosystem. Think about all the telcos that spent millions to get into the TV game around 2004.
One last thought from this article: "In a short time, more people will stream video online each day than will watch scheduled programs on traditional TV, according to a new study from Ericsson, the Swedish communications company."
]]>AT&T gets a $100M fine for selling unlimited accounts that were impaired for big users. The FCC had to fine them because the FTC did NOT do its job. And then ISPs are bewildered by that? How? It is false advertising. It is total BS. What it really is: Big ISP wondering how their money didn't oil the gears.
Forbes pundit, Fred Campbell, writes a lot about the overstepping of the FCC. Does he notice the lack of effort at the other F-agencies (FTA, FDA, FAA)? Or that there is a huge transition going on that isn't just about the technology - copper or fiber or spectrum, it is about migrating many moving parts - LNP, E-911, broadband, voice, et al - and thousands of players to the new platform. Also, the telcos are sloughing off copper for a number of reasons - unions, pensions, competitors - none of which has to do with next gen networks or tech.
The FCC's main job is to protect Consumers. Have you seen the number of outages including on E-911 systems lately? How about the 2,000 consumers who complained to the regulators about slow Internet, high prices, and data caps from top ISPs? That is why the Net Neutrality laws are being used as a hammer. From a business aspect, you may not like the uncertainty of it, but from a user angle it is about freaking time.
Want to get rid of the uncertainty? Then (a) stop lying in ads about unlimited; (b) build the network you keep promising; (c) put all that spectrum you are hording into play; (d) take care of your customers and deliver on promises. It is that simple.
Politco has a report on the RUS department's failure (?) at administering the BIP broadband stimulus fund of $3.5 billion. More than 40 BIP projects never got started - out of 255 projects funded.
"A POLITICO investigation has found that roughly half of the nearly 300 projects RUS approved as part of the 2009 Recovery Act have not yet drawn down the full amounts they were awarded. All RUS-funded infrastructure projects were supposed to have completed construction by the end of June," the report reads.
" As stimulus-funded networks were built, the RUS was not tracking the number of locations reached or the number of customers who had signed up for service, the GAO noted." [telecompetitor]
Both the Telecompetitor article and the Politico report are good reads. Did they do poor management? Absolutely. One reason: Politics. Failures at both RUS and NTIA were kept quiet for political reasons. Plus those who won awards -- picked by a volunteer collection of people - - may not have been in a position to carry out the project or even the reporting. Florida's NRBA and its management crew had lots of screw ups and failures along the way. It is the government trough.
In the wake of USF Reform and the CAF Trials, 15 Small Telcos Could Lose USF Support: FCC Analysis Shows 100% Competitive Overlap. And 11 more may be voted off the island by you.
]]>I look at our space and wonder what will happen.
VZ is rumored to be selling Terremark and its PBX business. It needs cash. You can say it is looking core, but does it want to be like Sprint?
Tom Goodwin, an executive at Havas Media, whose essay on March 3 on Techcrunch.com began: "Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening."
This headline from Morgan Stanley is a joke: Capital Creates More Commerce. If you meant, higher wages, better jobs create more commerce I would agree. Our economy is based on consumer spending and the Internet. The average wages have been stagnant or declining in the last 10 years. So how does the consumer spending increase - or even sustain?
More and more people are not W-2 employees, but 1099 self-employed - also called freelancers, contractors, even mistakenly entrepreneurs. 1099 means covering your own office, equipment, benefits, insurance, taxes and retirement. Good luck with that long term.
"Suddenlink is the 7th largest U.S. cable MSO with 1.5 million residential and 90,000 business customers across several states including Texas, West Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas and Arizona." [telecomp]
"Altice is a multinational cable and telecommunications company with operations across the globe, including Europe, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. This is their first foray into the U.S. market."
I get why Altice would want to enter the US market (same reason AT&T has bought its way into the LATAM market) - growth requires expansion. The pie is not growing. The pie is being split by more and more players. When the pie can't grow, the top execs want to cash out. See TWC, tw telecom and apparently Bright House as examples.
The largest corporations keep hording cash and buying companies. They get bigger. Bigger is never better. Ever. Not one case of it.
This isn't about the 1%. The 99% that spin the economy every day are getting jailed (where private corporations are taking tax dollars to jail them - but have a quota so police and courts have to fill them).
The education is broken. Why do we have a federal department of education? College loans are drowning our kids, while colleges expand using that loan money. Again getting bigger not better.
Robots are automating jobs out of existence. What then?
We have the same issues as we did during the run of West Wing from 1999-2006: education, homelessness, war, huge defense budget, deficit spending - but now we have 3 larger problems:
We aren't taking care of our veterans that we continually send off to combat. We can't grow our economy fast enough to get out of this financial mess that is a bubble. And we have a new housing crisis.
The new housing crisis is that no new affordable housing is being built. Twenty-somethings and even thirty-somethings can't get a mortgage due to student loan and credit card debt (and stringent mortgage guidelines). Rents are sky-rocketing. So where will workers - teachers, firemen, janitors - live?
"The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman think about the next generation." - James Freeman Clarke
Technology is not going to fix any of these problems. In fact, you could say that tech has exacerbated a couple of these problems.
Not so much a rant as a can you believe this??
I was going to link to citations for all of these issues, but just Google it.
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