article page |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7
Retiring Aged Strategy
Historical telecom strategic decision was very clear and usually a choice between two business paths:
- To pursue Internal vs External strategies?
- To build or buy?
- To own or resell?
- To compete in a new territory or protect an existing territory?
- To invest in new network equipment or to extend life of existing equipment?
These either-or decisions are typical of balanced market systems with clear, incremental change. These decisions don’t appropriately characterize the new market ecosystem of apps. There are too many players making interfering decisions. Your choice is dependent on what others do, and on what you think they will choose to
|
|
Our industry just wasted four years. Media is no longer a value-added service. Media is now an app. |
|
- What networks for what services?
- And now, interdependent with all these: how to use the cloud? And how to react to the cloud?
We recently explored ISV pricing strategy in the Cloud. As nicely documented in Mark Lowenstein’s June Lens, today, with a specific service provider, the same mobile data service costs different amounts on different networks. Is this deliberate or accidental? Is it sustainable?
I recognize that company strategies today seem crazy. They seem image-based, as if building brand image is equivalent to setting market strategy. On the plus side, the tide is turning again and it is now generally realized that more attention is needed to formulating strategic behavior and decisions in our
|
|
|
|
|
do, and on what they think you will choose to do: in other words a formal game. The market dynamics are complex and chaotic in behavior. The business choices of telecom service providers now are not expressible as a dichotomy. Today’s service provider faces interacting, interdependent decisions such as:
- Where to invest for development? Because investing here means not investing there.
- How to adjust to competitive pressures? And where are the next pressures coming from?
- Partner or not? Partner with whom? When will today’s partner become tomorrow’s competitor?
- Offer what mix of: horizontal or vertical approaches, regional or global distribution, specialized or general business markets, business or consumer, regulated or open traffic?
- Utility trunks or Value-added provider? Traditional or nontraditional services?
|
|
industry. Yea, Brother: strategy is back in. However, on the down side, general understanding of ‘what makes strategy’ remains primitive. Strategy is more complex than investigating competition, doing surveys, and developing a marketing plan. It starts with formulating realistic and advantageous goals. It requires understanding market dynamics and how decisions alter market behavior.
This is important. Our industry just wasted four years. Wide strategic failure occurred with the ‘simple to understand’ but ‘difficult to execute on’ original “Telco 2.0” model of ‘charging both ends of a media flow’. But there was a key truth embedded in the Telco 2.0 approach. The telecom ecosystem must decide how to make money in this universe of OTT apps. However, Media is no longer a value-added service. Media is now an app. One potential way is to invest in apps, that is, to invest in development and/or to invest in delivery. But why apps?
article page |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7
|
|
