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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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I'm sorry, but I'm getting tired of hearing how this company or that company is stifling innovation. We should expect this by now.
Every company in a position of power in their particular market will do whatever they can to stay in that position.
Are we really suprised that Microsoft isn't the only company in the world that likes to choke out its competition?
It's business, and big business at that. What MEN are doing is nothing more than standard commercial tactics. Dubious ones admittedly, but nothing that hasnt been done before or will be done again in the future.
The continuous pressures from the stock markets, share holders and investors to keep stock prices high means that companies are venturing further and further into the grey areas of business practice in order to achive and maintain high stock valuations.
Controlling technology is just another way of doing what Enron, Westcomm and KPNQWest did though dodgy financing. In this case its not quite as effective in terms of boosting share prices in the short term, but it's a whole lot more legal.
MEN, of course, means Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia.
Who cares? I wanna see the WOMEN of Wireless!
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
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?
So as a company they may be part of a group (MEN) that collectively keeps their own interests to heart, but there is no grand conspiracy as far as I could tell. Unless it is between the VPs or CEOs, or other people who make those important decisions. I was just a grunt that got sick of working for a lumbering giant with a cult-like company culture.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The Red Herring article quotes "complaints", "claims" and other loosely justified attacks on the companies, which, quite frankly, border on slander. At the same time, many are missing a crucial point; it's not MEN that are making technological mischoices so much as the carriers.
If I had a grocery store and customers wanted to buy yesterday's bananas, then, by Jove, that's what I'd be selling them!
On the lighter side, how about this for an acronym: Siemens, LUcent Technologies, Nortel Networks?
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.
MEN are the NME.
It's a chicken-and-the-egg argument. Is money evil for luring us, or are we evil for our love of it.
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
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?
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
Is it just me, or does "bad men of wireless" sound like one of those "beefcake" calendars, possibly featuring shirtless RF engineers in provocative poses [shudder...]
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
You know, if corporations behaved less badly, there'd be fewer anti-corporate stories. This is news, it's news for nerds, and frankly it's fair and objective reporting. Just because the facts conflict with your ideological hobbyhorse doesn't mean that it isn't news.
The article has it backwards: These three all rely on product renewal for growth.
To clarify the situation with AMPS-
Individual phones are not required to support AMPS, but carriers who operate in the 800 MHz band are still required to maintain AMPS compatibility on their networks. The theory being (at least in part) that anyone with an AMPS handset should be able to at least place an emergency call wherever there is an 800 MHz network. Hopefully the US will take the European approach and finally permit carriers to start turning this off soon and reclaiming some bandwidth.
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.
The author has got quite a few of the supporting "facts" in his articles wrong, not to mention the fact that his conclusions are all backwards. From the inside of at least part of a wireless infrastructure division of MEN, things are going faster and more frantic with shorter product cycles just over the past couple years. The earlier comment was dead-on, profits for MEN are driven by upgrades to new technology, not by expanding existing networks. Ripping out all that 2G and 2.5G hardware and replacing it with backward-compatible 3G hardware is a pretty profitable enterprise, and the prospect of doing the same thing to convert the network backhaul to packet/IP is also lucrative.
Like it or not, VoIP is being used already for international calls - you may already be using it without knowing in some cases. The bandwidth is something of a red herring - they are massively expanding their IP networks using SONET/SDH rings and/or DWDM in order to carry a great deal more data traffic, so adding VoIP alongside this is relatively easy (much smaller amount of bandwidth). Latency is not a problem given suitable QoS and link-level fragmentation on slow speed links - in fact some VoIP carriers even use multiple Internet links, switching between them as required to maintain latency (though personally I'd prefer a non-Internet VoIP network, and most carriers will use this).
VoIP is also mandated by the UMTS Release 4 and 5 standards - some operators will launch with Release 4, so they will be using VoIP for cellular calls.