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Bad MEN Of Wireless
justbeatit wrote to us with an article from
Red Herring about the bad MEN of Wireless. MEN, of course, means Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia.
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Not invented by the big three, hyped and failed.
.com "millionaires" who bitched that suppliers wouldn't give them as good a deal as they gave Sears.
Part of the issue here is that there are a few basic tennets for the wireless industry
1) Open Standards, strange to say but the folks at these three are actively pushing such standards
2) Security and reliability, the operators have to support the hardware so they won't buy that which isn't reliable as it costs them more.
3) Investment, these three have invested huge amounts of cash already, and don't want to see Mr Johnny come lately investing 3c and getting a totally different level of ROI.
4) Fear. Of Microsoft, Of diminising returns, Of competition. This is a tough marketplace and they would prefer to be the last man standing, and so anyone new isn't being blocked out by a cartel, but blocked out by 3 companies who see newcommers as potential allies of their competitors.
For someone to complain that they are blocked out of the "wireless messaging" meetings when they don't manufacture handsets is a bit rich. This is like me complaining that I get cut out of UN Security Council meetings just because I'm not a country and don't have an army.
Big business is often bad, but these aer three companies that act against each other to drive down prices and drive up inovation. Small fry on the side who bitch that $1,000 doesn't buy them the same seat at the table as $1,000,000,000 are just as clueless as the
Welcome to capitalism, if you don't like it... become an accountant.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
If you're having a hard time coming up with a great new idea, what's the easiest way to stay in buisness? keep others from coming up with great new ideas, or prevent them from using them. We all know money is the root of evil, and we all yearn for it, are we not all evil? Being evil, you'd have to agree with their practices, in their position, but if what they do affects you in any negative way, you bitch.
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
On the other hand, slashdot was recently complaining that Japan gets all the cool stuff, which includes cooler cell phones with higher data throughput, full-color screens, and video telephony. Seeing as how the MEN have failed in the japanese market, are the MEN even very relevant?
Just yesterday, Virgin (as in airlines/music stores/etc.) brought their line of mobile phones to the US market. Being questioned on Fox News last night, Richard Branson said that the US looks like a good market because only 45% of people have cell phones (where in England it's 85% and in some other European countries, as high as 90%). He claims that in doing research with the 18-25 market, he found that the average non-mobile phone user doesn't feel there's a good brand name they can latch onto (in spite of MEN apparently). They've co-branded their phone with MTV and have gotten it into over 12,000 retail locations - as of yesterday. In addition, they're adding some kind of musical function to their phones - but he didn't elaborate in the interview.
So, I dunno - it all sounds like capitalism to me. Maybe it's a screwy Major Corporation vs. Major Corporation capitalism with no place for the small business person, but it's capitalism just the same.
Believe me, they don't really know what they are doing.
Yeah, I can coroborate that. Example: One of our customers wants our software to interface with their switch. When we went to the manufacturer (Who isn't one of MEN but whos name begins with S) to get a spec for the interface that their equipment has. They swore blind that what we trying to do was impossible.
So, one of our developers spent a week with access to said model of switch. Lo and behold, he achieves the (apparently) impossible! I'm not even sure we've bothered to tell the manuacturer.
Mobile Telecoms a funny 'ol business though.
Atleast there is competition between those three, at PC OS market there is/was no competition at all againts M$.
All of those three are now starting to support Symbian OS and Java. Would the situation be the same if there were 20 companies with each having 5% share of the market?
To me as a customer it's alot easier when there are only few models to choose from and even those have the same OS.
As a programmer it's very nice to see my Java code working in all of those phones.
How do you define optimal market? Thousand companies, hundred companies, ten companies or just a one company?
Generally, no-one knows where the wireless industry is headed. The one thing that everyone does know is that 3G has the potential to become the most expensive suicide note in history!
There are still a lot of folks emplyed in the wireless industry. If 3G doesn't work there are going to be a lot of unemployed engineers.
I am working for Ericsson and IMHO, Ericsson is not a bad company. And I think it does not have a market dominance which it had a few years ago. Its shares are standing quite low at the moment and from the inside its future is not so bright.
IMO, Ericsson troubles can be traced back to one problem which name is AXE. AXE is a telephone exchange and the most successful product of Ericsson. All over the world you can find AXEs in exchanges. The problem is that everyone already bought an AXE, so there is almost no market to sell more. Another reason is that AXE is quite old. It was developed in the '70s and it starts showing its age. There were projects to create a new type of AXE, but they failed.
This is the reason why Ericsson partnered with Juniper. The future is IP telephony and Ericsson needs a partner to develop its next flagship product.
As for the article, it claims that MEN are holding back wireless technology. I think this is not true. From the inside it seems the carriers do not have the money to buy the state-of-the-art 3G and UMTS equipment because they threw away their money at the UMTS tenders. Ericsson hopes in 2003 the carriers will overcome their predicament and start buying. Otherwise, lay offs will continue...
Everything I wrote in this comment is my personal opinion only and NOT an official statement from Ericsson.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
What did said intern need a UNIX account for? It sounds suspicious...
I was once a BOFH with M. It was my job to determine whether or not interns (or full-blown employees for that matter) actually really needed UNIX accounts or not... and to deny them without telling their supervisors why... deliberately making it look like either a big bloated bureaucracy dragging its feet or a conspiracy against them, whichever scenario best suited our egos. Most requests for new accounts came because somebody wanted to poke their noses around systems where they didn't belong, or perhaps to spy on company secrets, etc. All in the name of paranoid security, and justification of access to expensive systems that were really meant for elite users only, we did our jobs well and took great pride in doing them.