Good analysis in this TechCrunch post about the changing Cellphone market.
Is there any question what Google is doing here? They’re taking the traditional mobile model in this country, where you first choose your carrier, and then choose your phone, and turning it upside down. It’s what Apple started with the iPhone.
The networks have always been used to being “The Brand” – traditionally you picked your network and then saw what phones you could get. Yet in essence they’re just providing a commodity (the connectivity) and most of the user experience is dictated by the phone the user holds in their hand.
Sadly the carriers seem completely unable to adapt to this changing world, and are still stuck in an old mindset of:
- Long term contracts with punishing penalties even if you want to upgrade your phone but stay with them.
- Completely opaque pricing so you can’t actually compare them properly.
- Bills which seem to bear no relation to what you were expecting to pay looking at their price list (which seems to be a Vodafone speciality in particular, but they’re all bad).
- Usurious roaming rates.
- Very restrictive conditions around data use (although this got better when Apple forced o2 to do the right thing for the iPhone)
Hopefully someone deep inside one of the carriers will realise there’s a competitive advantage to be had by stepping away from the old outdated model, and come up with a plan that:
- Has reasonable lock in period
- Allows you to upgrade as you wish for reasonable rates
- Transparent pricing
- Reasonable roaming rates (e.g. almost the same as normal domestic use)
It has got to happen at some point, surely?
The view from my office at home, taken and posted using the WordPress iPhone app.
No hope of getting in to the office today and even if we did I suspect it would be lonely!
Interesting analysis of the numbers in this post, which ends as follows:
Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.
This post comes up with the spoof idea that we’ll all need to travel naked in future, and develops the theme nicely explaining how it would work as the best preventative measure ever:
Think about the people you see on airplanes. Then imagine what they would look like naked. Eeeew. That’s right, fat, old, wrinkled, smelly bodies surrounding you. Not a muscle would flex on board, fearing that they might touch someone’s sagging fleshiness. Every muscle would go limp. Minds would shut down. Aside from the occasional retching, there would be utter silence as people froze in place to avoid any possibility of human contact. You can’t bring down an airplane with your eyes tightly shut.
Very insightful!
