An interesting evening last night at a Vodafone-sponsored dinner event around the subject of communication at work.
Other than once again confirming for me that there are too many CIOs who are so devoid of communication skills that their comment on the matter is laughable, it set me thinking about the quandary that the mobile phone industry appears to find itself in. They don't really seem to know what their long-term future is.
The consumerisation of particularly mobile devices is meaning that for many organisations there should be serious discussion about whether company mobile phones are actually required any more. You might want to offer your employees a work “number”, and even to cover some of their expenses for their work mobile use, but they'll probably be happier if they can just use their iPhone or Android, it will be cheaper for both parties, and if you have your collaboration platform in the Cloud, then integration is trivial these days.
(There is one notable exception to this world, and that's if your people roam a lot. Then you're left with the choice of erm, er, BlackBerry.)
Now in a world when employers don't provide handsets, big corporate mobile contracts start to break down, and phone provisioning becomes an even more cut-throat consumer market where margin is everything. That's a lot of stable, long-term revenue that's at stake as switching mobile provider for one user is a cinch, where doing it for an entire corporation is such a pain that many don't bother until the existing provider becomes so bad and/or expensive.
The problem for the mobile telcos is that that the fixed line ones faced five or so years ago in the light of local loop unbundling. If you don't have a monopoly to provide services over expensive infrastructure, your customer base fragments, and you traditional product (telephone calls) becomes nearly cost-free, what do you do?
Witness the flailing BT (one minute systems integrator, the next a digital TV platform provider) to see the confusion that this might lead to. Meanwhile Google (bless 'em), Skype and others are poised to re-conceptualise the entire voice telecoms industry in the way that the Googleplexers did for the
advertising industry.
mmitII 