Mar 15
William Shatner explains microprocessor technology in this AT&T produced video from the 1980. It’s cool to look back and see the predictions of the past. This video presentation is extremely well done and worth a watch, heck it’s Shatner!
Thanks to Engadget for the link.
Dec 27
In the past I have ranted about examples of poor customer service, such as the iPhone 3G launch by Apple, or the exclusive selection of AT&T as the iPhone carrier by Apple. I thought it only fair to point out an example of excellent customer service I experienced today at Les Schwab.
With all the snow we have had in the Seattle area in the past week, snow chains are almost a necessity. In anticipation of the storms, I purchased chains for each of our cars. Since chains were in short supply, I had to visit more than one store to find the correct sizes for each car. I ended up at a very busy Les Schwab store in Redmond, but was greeted within a few seconds of entering the store and after just a couple of minutes had a brand new set of chains.
Well, the chains worked very well for a couple of days, but after repeatedly putting them on and taking them off, the rubber connector for the chain tightener snapped. Undoubtedly, I was pulling too hard on the connector when it snapped. To me it is obvious the part is under-engineered and therefore prone to breaking. In fact, for my second car, they sold me a slightly different version with a much improved rubber connector attached to the chain tightener. I decided to take the chains back to Les Schwab to see about a refund or replacement.
Arriving at the store, I was again surprised at how busy the store was, but in less than 15 seconds, I was being helped by en employee at the counter. After listening to my complaint about the poort design of the chains, the Les Schwab employee offered to immediately repair the chains. He left the counter to go find a replacement connector. As my son and I stood at the counter waiting, in the space of no more than 3 minutes, we were asked by 7 Schwab employees if we had been helped or if we needed anything while we were waiting. After about 3 minutes, he returned to the counter and informed me he was having trouble locating a replacement part, and so I would not have to wait any longer, he would simply swap the chains for a brand new set. I was amazed.
It is a testament to Les Scwab (died in 2007), and the current Les Schwab management, that every employee understands the importance of the customer and ensuring a positive customer experience.
I imagine that Les Schwab will weather (pun intended) the current economic downturn better than many of their competitors because of their relentless focus on the customer.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=fd0e224b-40ca-43ca-8725-209e1e7015b8)
History is replete with examples of products, companies, and industries that fail to adapt and adopt to new technology. An article @PCWorld by Mark Sullivan on the 5 most anti-tech organizations in America.
Their names keep coming up over and over again in courtrooms and corridors of power across the country–those groups whose interests always seem to run counter to those of technology companies and consumers. They come in many forms: associations, think tanks, money-raising organizations, PACs, and even other tech-oriented industries like telecommunications.
The tech issues that they’re concerned with are what you might expect: digital rights management and fair use, patent law, broadband speed and reach, wireless spectrum and network neutrality. I talked to a good number of tech and media policy insiders in Washington, D.C.–mostly off the record–to find out who these groups are, how they operate, and who pays their bills. We’ll start with the biggest offenders first and work our way down.
- RIAA
- The Pharmaceutical/Biotech Industry
- Big Telco Companies, Industry Group USTelecom
- Verizon, AT&T, Progress and Freedom Foundation
- Large Wireless Carriers and the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA); TV Broadcasters and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB)
Ok, I buy the RIAA argument. I can even see how one can make an argument about big telcos and their industry organizations are slow to adopt new technologies. But the RIAA’s biggest crime, as it were, was not being anti-tech, but being out of touch with consumers–it’s customers.
Opposition to “net neutrality” is not by definition anti-tech. Case in point broadband. Take the MSOs and the introduction of cable modems. The cable industry moved at “broadband speed” to develop, test and deploy cable modem technology to the market. Why? They understood upcoming technology and bandwidth requirements and they anticipated customers demand. The cable industry took a risk and made investments assuming returns on those investments.
I’m not sure where net neutrality got off track. The initial mantra was equal access to information flowing over the Internet. Sounds great. Unfortunately proponents call for government to enforce equality. If you follow the major tech press you’ve undoubtedly heard the pro net neutrality arguments. For a look at an opposing viewpoint, The Cato Institute has prepared a policy analysis document which can be found athttp://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-507es.html.
Such rhetoric and calls for preemptive regulation are unjustified. There is no evidence that broadband operators are unfairly blocking access to websites or online services today, and there is no reason to expect them to do so in the future. No firm or industry has any sort of “bottleneck control” over or market power in the broadband marketplace; it is very much a competitive free-for-all, and no one has any idea what the future market will look like with so many new technologies and operators entering the picture. In the absence of clear harm, government typically doesn’t regulate in a preemptive, prophylactic fashion as CBUI members are requesting.
Moreover, far from being something regulators should forbid, vertical integration of new features and services by broadband network operators is an essential part of the innovation strategy companies will need to use to compete and offer customers the services they demand. Network operators also have property rights in their systems that need to be acknowledged and honored. Net neutrality mandates would flout those property rights and reject freedom of contract in this marketplace.
The regulatory regime envisioned by Net neutrality mandates would also open the door to a great deal of potential “gaming” of the regulatory system and allow firms to use the regulatory system to hobble competitors. Worse yet, it would encourage more FCC regulation of the Internet and broadband markets in general.
Government regulation of the Internet or broadband providers is a proverbial slippery slope–or in this case maybe better described as a slippery water slide.
The rest of the original article can be found at PCWorld
Silicon Alley Insider spotted a research note from Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster estimating that Apple is receiving $18 per month for each iPhone subscriber, under the revenue-sharing agreement between the two companies. Apple has confirmed that such an agreement exists, but has not shared the details about exactly how much cash it’s getting from the revenue AT&T makes on iPhone customers using the carrier’s data network.
Sean Buckley of Telecommunications magazine writes that one quote from the IPTV World Forum in London really stood out for him. That quote, from Accenture’s Arjang Zadeh, stated “quality, not content, is king.” Well, yes and no. It is not that simple, let me explain.
Why would such a quote stand out in Mr. Buckley’s mind? Well, as he goes on to explain, it hits home for him because of problems he encounters with his current provider, Comcast. Fortunately, one of the problems Mr. Buckley describes with Comcast, the transient but eerily predictable, “timeout” error when trying to access the On Demand service, can most likely be explained as an artifact of delivering a two-way service over a network originally designed to support one-way video. Press, On Demand again, and everything works fine. Strange.
IPTV is not immune from “strange” quirks either. In fact ANY digital service is subject to these “quirks”. You see with an analog TV signal (really any analog signal, but we are talking IPTV here) there is a graceful degradation of quality–without entirely interrupting the video program. Remember snow? Depending on the strength of the analog signal you have a really great picture or you have a less than great picture but you have one. In a digital system, digital cable, satellite or IPTV, the degradation is less graceful. Depending on what bits are lost, the picture may still look great, there may be “macroblocking” or the picture may drop entirely. Any of these digital artifacts may occur to cable, satellite or IPTV. Our experience in the field showed us that subscribers that came directly to IPTV from an analog service (Off Air, analog cable) were more sensitive by the digital artifacts. Those that had previous “digital experience” were less sensitive to the artifacts. Makes sense, now.
Without describing in full detail all the of mechanisms available in an IPTV system to ensure Quality of Experience (QoE), suffice it to say, there are several just at the network level which ensure the reliable delivery of packets to the IPTV STB. Of course, IPTV benefits from its inherit support of two-way traffic (unlike the CATV network to which two-way capability has been added).
Furthermore, QoE depends not only on the effectiveness of the network (core, transport, access), but the experience provided by the software platform. Just ask any subscriber of early stage IPTV deployments. Our early customers and their subscribers suffered through painful stages of learning–ours and the service providers–as the industry learned to deliver video over the telecom network reliably. These are the pains I have recently written about for the AT&T Uverse deployment.
However, content is an integral part of QoE and cannot be excluded from analysis. What we (my employer, Siemens Communications) have learned from our leading IPTV customer Belgacom, is that content remains king. This is where I believe I part ways with Messrs Buckley and Zadeh.
Belgacom learned is if licensing premium content was king, licensing exclusive content is like being the galactic emperor. Through their licensing of Belgian Premiere soccer, they attracted and more importantly retain subscribers. As you might expect from any relatively new technology, there have been QoE issues at Belgacom. However, understanding that great content is part of the overall QoE has been critical to the rapid success of BelgacomTV. A lesson for all IPTV service providers..
Mar 1
Om Malik, from Gigaom (see links on right), has written a piece on AT&T Uverse deployment of the Microsoft IPTV platform.
It is hard to get a grip on AT&T’s IPTV efforts. Dubbed Uverse, some say AT&T’s television service it is still stuck in neutral, plagued by technical problems. AT&T, however feels otherwise, and has started making a strong marketing push for the service, according to a report in San Antonio-Express News. The company claims that it has ironed out all the technical glitches and is now ready to take on the cable operators.
We’re ready to take our foot off the brake and step on the accelerator, John Stankey, AT&T’s group president for operations, said Tuesday. By the end of the year, we will be up and running in every significantly sized market where we operate.
Fascinating, since it was only a couple of months ago that the company’s tech troubles were highlighted in the Wall Street Journal, pointing to the problems with Microsoft IPTV software.
From everything I know from publicly available sources and people close to the Microsoft product, the Uverse deployment is stabilizing (apparently, enought that AT&T feels compelled to begin limited rollouts), however the actual deployed service will have far fewer features than AT&T had hoped for and an order of magnitude fewer features than the Microsoft marketing machine has been pitching for the past 2 years.
The actual Uverse product looks very little like what Microsoft has been showing to the market–at trade shows and other public events. Many features of dubious customer value, like “instant channel change” are conspicuously absent from the Uverse deployment. However, their absence is not by choice, but due to poor architectural choices and a poor understanding of service provider economics. It looks like Microsoft is learning the hard lessons about building a scalable IPTV solution–lessons the rest of the industry learned years ago. It would also appear AT&T is learning a tough lesson about listening to the Redmond marketing machine.
Unfortunately for AT&T, the next lessons will be even more painful as their “partner” begins competing with them for their own customers. Just look at what’s happening with Xbox Cinema on Xbox Live. Microsoft has gone to great lengths to ensure their brand remains prominent in their IPTV offering. There will be no question in the mind of Uverse users that they are using a Microsoft product (insert joke here).
The Uverse service gives Microsoft a prime opportunity to upsell subscribers to other Microsoft products like Media Center PCs, powered by Vista and mobile devices powered by Windows Mobile. These devices do not have to be connected to the AT&T Uverse service but connected directly to Microsoft “over the top” of AT&T.
Thus far, Microsoft has played nice (relatively speaking) with its service provider customers in the mobile arena. This is not surprising when you recognize that they have the financial resources and investor backing to be very very patient when entering new markets. However, just as the success of the iPod precipiated Microsoft dumping its “Plays for sure” partners and building their own “iPod killer”, the Zune, I believe the iPhone will inspire the monopolists in Redmond to take a harder stance with wireless operators and begin to push for concessions that give them more control over the mobile devices running Windows–just as they do on PCs today. The emphasis for Microsoft will shift from providing capabilities that give wireless operators the platform and toolsets to build compelling wireless features, to the virtues Windows Mobile for the wireless consumer. The service providers differentiation and value add will diminish to the point that the average mobile consumer won’t care from whom they get the service, but only that they have the latest version of Windows Mobile and Microsoft mobile applications (has anyone seen this movie before?).
This same fate awaits AT&T in their wireline business as their Uverse subscribers increasingly look for Windows and Windows applications, caring less and less about the network (and service provider) that delivers them. The next few years should be interesting.
Colbert hits the nail on the head during his historical diagram of the history of AT&T. So sad to see my “favorite” wireless company disappearing. Too bad they can’t improve their customer service as easily as changing names.
Jan 12
Dear Mr. Jobs,
Recently at MacWorld 2007 you introduced the iPhone to raving audience and analyst reviews. I don’t remember any product that has been so eagerly anticipated and then exceeded our collective wildest expectations. I must admit, I want one, I want one bad. My wife wants one, even the Microsoft employees on my flight home from CES (I clearly attended the wrong show) want one! What’s not to like? Revolutionary mobile phone, iPod and Internet communicator all in one sleek device, we all marvel at how you folks at Apple do it. Congratulations to everyone at Apple on what will surely be more than just a successful new product, but a category redefining innovation!
However, during your keynote presentation you indicated that Apple has entered into an exclusive agreement with AT&T, in the US, as the mobile service provider for the iPhone. It is our understanding that the iPhone will work exclusively with AT&T and that consumers with other mobile service providers will not be able to use the iPhone unless they switch to AT&T. The question on many of our minds is why? Why tie this revolutionary product exclusively to AT&T?
We were all astounded as you demonstrated the many revolutionary capabilities of the iPhone. What stood out was the category defining user experience of the iPhone. You have left the traditional handset companies in the dust! What you must realize, is you have left an important part of the overall iPhone user experience in the hands of AT&T. While AT&T believes they have the most reliable network in the US, they certainly have the most reliably poor customer service. The iPhone, the network and the customer service all combine to create the “iPhone experience”. Apple has clearly done its part to create a wonderful user experience, are you sure you want to leave the rest in the hands of AT&T’s infamous customer service?
As you are probably aware, AT&T rated at the bottom of a recent Consumer Reports survey of 42,921 readers. My personal experience echoes that of the Consumer Reports readers. I work for a large multi-national company, part of the Fortune 500. We use AT&T, almost exclusively and have close to 50,000 (my guess based on our 70,000+ US employees) business accounts with them. Even with such a large account, I am rarely treated with the respect that is warranted such a large account. How will AT&T treat your (Apple) customers?
I was amazed at the press reports describing the statements from AT&T about their “agreement” with Apple. They certainly sounded arrogant and were gloating over “bending” Apple to conform to their terms. Is this true? For what possible reason would Apple need to “bend” to sign an exclusive deal with AT&T? Surely you have read the reports of AT&T’s gloating over at PCMag (you do read PCMag occasionally, right?). Cingular makes Apple Bend.
It certainly makes sense that there is a lot of work in putting together a feature like Visual Voicemail, and doing the work over and over with other service providers is costly. However, this cannot be the reason for linking iPhone exclusively to AT&T. Why then?
In stark contrast to the exclusivity with AT&T, your selection of GSM as the network technology was an excellent choice. GSM is a standard that allows the iPhone to be used almost anywhere on the planet and with leading service providers. GSM also allows for interchangeable SIM cards to link a GSM handset with a particular service provider. The iPhone has a SIM card slot and could therefore easily be linked to any GSM compatible service provider–a service provider chosen by Apple customers not by Apple corporate.
Mr. Jobs, please let us select our own service provider. Open the iPhone to other service providers or create an “unlocked” version of the iPhone. Let your customers decide which service provider to choose to complete the iPhone experience.
Best regards,
Ryan Petty
Over at ITVT, there is a two part interview with representatives from Siemens and Microsoft debating their varying approaches to IPTV technologies and the market. Of course, I am biased as my team and I make many of the decisions about the Siemens approach to the market as well as many of the technology choices in our solution.
It will be very interesting to hear the Microsoft marketing machine as they respond to our perspective as captured in part one. The Microsoft marketing machine has typically done a very good job in “responding” to critical reviews of their IPTV solution.
For those of you who don’t understand the approach Microsoft has taken in IPTV, it is classic Microsoft.. Take the best ideas from the market leaders (embrace), and modify the established approach to enhance your competitive position (extend).
For IPTV, Microsoft used several plays from this well worn playbook. For example, Microsoft embraced much of the established ideas in IPTV, but they created a new feature they call “instant channel change” (ICC). Before Microsoft came into the market, no one knew they needed ”instant” channel change, but Microsoft’s marketing team has convinced many telco executives that they must have ICC. In my view, this is not exactly the kind of disruptive feature a telco needs to convince a customer to leave cable or satellite and move to IPTV.
What Microsoft does not tell customers, is that to achieve a nearly instant channel change, it requires a completely proprietary broadcast architecture, deviating from accepted IPTV architectures, with extensive and costly use of unicast, and a complete dependency on Microsoft technologies (codec, DRM, streaming servers etc.). Complete technology lock in and reliance on Microsoft. Who really benefits from instant channel change, well Microsoft, of course. As we and others began to question the market value of such a feature, the market finally took a critical look at Microsoft’s approach.
In the end, the technological complexity (think cost, $$$) required by the Microsoft approach and the fact that it relies on Microsoft server software (which everyone knows is not even close to carrier grade), can not be justified by the business case. Will instant channel change come to a TV near you, possibly, but a number of vendors have shown a way to achieve the same result by using a standards based approach–with no Microsoft lock in.
Instant channel change is just one example, but Microsoft has been very quiet about most of their competitive differentiators as of late. Why? Well, they are under the gun to get AT&T working beyond trial subscribers.
Of course the Microsoft marketing machine would have us all believe they have “launched”, well that is a matter of perspective. My belief is that AT&T cannot deploy anywhere, anytime to any subscriber nor can they market the service at full speed because Microsoft is still working through service debilitating bugs and cannot show the scalability that AT&T needs to go full speed ahead.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=fa7c4f95-990c-4f54-a724-9e3dc6c0bf31)
Linen Theme by The Theme Foundry
Copyright © 2012 Ryan Petty. All rights reserved.