I penned the piece below for our Straight Talk daily email the day after the US election. Since that time I’ve seen more and more articles springing up around this subject, some of them based on new news such as the appointments to the various Congressional committees overseeing aspects of telecoms. Some examples:
Here’s my piece from a few weeks ago. Also on the topic of regulation, the “5 things regulators can do to stimulate telecoms” I mentioned in this post will be published in the Straight Talk monthly publication in December – co-authored with Matthew Howett, who heads our regulation team.
What the US election means for telecoms
The Dow Jones stock index dropped around 5% on Wednesday in an apparent response to the election of Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. Some investors fear an increase in regulation and taxation and a negative impact on businesses under an Obama administration. Telecoms operators should start thinking about what an Obama presidency will mean for their businesses too.
A deregulatory FCC administration comes to a close
The accepted wisdom appears to be that the Chairman of the FCC, Kevin Martin, will step down following the election of Barack Obama, and will likely be replaced by a Democrat nominated by the incoming president. This will shift the balance at the FCC from a 3-2 Republican majority to a 3-2 Democratic majority for the first time in eight years. As the terms of the other commissioners expire over the next few years there may be further changes in the composition of the commission.
The Martin FCC and the regime of his predecessor, Michael Powell, have taken a largely deregulatory, hands-off approach to the US telecoms sector. They have given the green light to large mergers such as Deutsche Telekom’s acquisition of Voicestream, SBC’s acquisition of AT&T and AT&T’s subsequent acquisitions of BellSouth and Cingular, Verizon’s acquisition of MCI, and just this week the acquisition of Alltel by Verizon Wireless and the merger of Sprint’s WiMAX assets with Clearwire. As such they have presided over a significant thinning of the major players in the US market, leaving four major wireless operators and three major wireline carriers (with Verizon and AT&T making up two of the members of both camps).
At the same time, regulations have been rolled back in a number of areas, reducing the reporting and network access requirements imposed on the RBOCs and focusing on facilities based competition as the preferred alternative to regulation-dependent, service based competition. This has resulted in an effective duopoly between cable companies and telcos in the consumer market and an oligopoly in the large enterprise market, with only the small and medium sized business market seeing a significant number of competitors.
Larger operators likely to suffer most, but broader repercussions likely
The incoming FCC is likely to take a different approach, much more sceptical of further concentration of market power in the hands of a small number of players, and much less likely to lift regulation. Indeed, it is also much more likely than the outgoing administration to finally tackle the issue of net neutrality decisively, something the Martin administration dodged for a long time and then handled only half-heartedly earlier this year.
As such, the large operators which have done so well under President Bush are likely to find life rather harder under President Obama, while smaller players and consumer groups are much more likely to have their voices heard. The change at the FCC is likely to be echoed in other government institutions too, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, both of which have roles to play in regulation competition and merger activity in the telecoms sector too.
On top of all this, broader changes in the government’s approach to regulating business will impact the telecom sector too. The Obama adminstration’s likely focus on environmental issues may lead to more stringent emissions standards, for example, something which hits telcos with their large fleets of specialised vehicles particularly hard. Tax rates on corporations may have to be raised to pay for some of the income tax cuts and increases in spending proposed by the Obama campaign.
At the same time, the drive towards sustainability should also provide opportunities for telcos, which stand to gain from efforts to substitute telecommuting, TelePresence, telemedicine and other innovations for their less carbon friendly current incarnations. If the Obama campaign makes good on its promise to invest in clean energy and other technology to reduce emissions, telcos may be the beneficiaries of some of this spending too.
Larger telcos are likely to feel the impact of the change in adminstrations more than their smaller brethren, but all telcos are likely to have to make some adjustments and concessions under the new regime.
Google is famous for its “uncluttered design” especially as regards the Google home (search) page. Well, yes, we’ll give them that. Not hard to be better than Yahoo! in this regard given that Yahoo! was a directory first and a search engine second, and in between had become a bloated all things to all people portal.
But there are some things Google really doesn’t do well, or at least could do much better in relation to design, and also in relation to the features of some of its core products. Here are ten of them, from a purely personal perspective as a user of these products:
Gmail
1. OK – they finally gave us themes this past week. But why the heck did it take so long? And why were users limited to third party browser add-ons to achieve this effect? How hard could it be? But more importantly than themes (I’m using Shiny these days, by the way), is the design itself. So this one is more of a past peeve than a current one, but is reflective of how long it takes Google to get some of the basics in place. And I still can’t pick the colors of individual theme elements myself – I have to go with a complete package (pretty though they are).
2. Why should it take me two clicks (or more often one click, a scroll and a click) to file a message in a folder (sorry, under a “tag”)? I have the list of tags in my left navbar anyway – why not just let me drag the message there, as I can in any desktop email program and in Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail (or Live Mail, or whatever it’s called these days)? Are you worried that the extra page weight will slow the app down? Let me choose! You already give me an option to use the “Older version” and an option to use the HTML only version on a slow connection.
3. Why can’t I decide once and for all what font I want to write in, and have multiple signatures? Have you just assumed that if I’m serious about this stuff I’ll use a desktop client via IMAP? Why would I do that? The way you’ve implemented IMAP with tags and folders it screws up my list of folders every time I try to do it – I get three different trash folders and no easy way to manage archiving items… Again, how hard could it be to implement basic email templating and a signature picklist?
Google Maps
4. Why is it that you can remember locations I’ve typed in to the search bar and auto-suggest them when I’m typing but I can’t easily retrieve that list later? And then your “My Maps” feature is entirely separate? Can’t you integrate the two, and let me easily view all the locations I’ve previously either typed in or saved under My Maps in one easy list? You might allow me to sort that list by geography, or history, or by various tags I might have applied (if you let me do that). The way things are now, I’m forced to remember some element of an address to get it to pop up again in the auto-suggest list.
5. Secondly, why can’t you do a simple integration between Google Maps on the desktop and Google Maps for Mobile? I’ve been wondering this ever since I started using Google Maps on my BlackBerry and it’s still a bugbear on my iPhone. Why not allow me to access both my “My Maps” locations and recently searched locations from my desktop on my phone, and vice versa? I’m happy to log into my account in order to do this. Your friends at Yahoo! figured out how to do it long ago and it really can’t be that hard. After all, how likely am I to have my desktop/laptop PC open in front of me with a wireless connection to the Internet as I’m trying to follow those directions I looked up, compared with how likely I am to have my phone with me? And how about a “send to mobile” option so I could send myself an SMS with a link that will open in the Maps app or a browser on whatever mobile device I’m using?
Google Reader
6. My main frustration with Google Reader is that I have a lot of my own direct subscriptions but also several subscriptions to other people’s shared items. Because there’s a fair amount of overlap in coverage areas between these various feeds, I often find that an item that is in one of my direct subscriptions also shows up in one or more of the shared items feeds. It’s possible that I’ll sometimes see the same item directly, again in the TechMeme feed, and then two more times in shared items. Although the TechMeme one is hard to solve without a bit more cleverness, it should be straightforward to implement a filter to allow me to just see the item once (with appropriate annotations to indicate it was also in shared items – perhaps along the lines of FriendFeed’s recently added Related Items feature which I really like). I’m fine with it appearing in each of the appropriate folders so I come across it sooner rather than later, but once I’ve read it once, mark it as read everywhere else too. Please?
7. Then let me filter out stuff I’m not interested in. I subscribe to Engadget Mobile, but what if I’m bored about all the stories about the G1 phone? Why can’t I request that Google Reader automatically mark all stories as read in that feed if they mention the G1? Give me filters with some granularity to do this effectively so I can automatically discard things I know I’m not interested in.
8. Then add filters to move items into a special priority folder if they mention keywords I’m particularly interested in, so I can read those before I trawl through the rest.
9. Lastly, let me find features a lot more quickly and easily. Several times now I’ve had to go to a Google web search (ironically) to figure out how to get a Google Reader Shared Items widget for my blog. I shouldn’t have to do this. First, you call it a “clip” instead of a widget, which means I can’t find it using your Help search function. Not helpful. But then you bury it in a totally unintuitive section of the Reader settings. Instead of simply putting that option on the Shared Items page, where it belongs, I have to go and look under Tags and Folders. Now, there’s a reason for that – I might theoretically want to get widgets (sorry, clips) for specific tags or folders as well so you want that feature option there – fair enough. But put two links then – one under shared items (which is the logical place) and one under Tags and Folders.
Google Calendar
10. Again, it’s a question of helping me find features / functions by putting them in a logical place. I want to be able to set whether or not Google Calendar automatically creates a reminder for new calendar items, and if so what the characteristics are. So where do I go? Settings, right? But no, it’s not there. There’s no sign of it there. So I go into a calendar item and find the reminder section. Is there a link there to tell me where to change this setting? No. So I go to the Help function and it tells me that to change this setting I need to click on the tiny arrow next to the name of a specific calendar in the left navbar and then select Notifications (not Reminders, but Notifications, despite the fact that in individual appointments they’re referred to as reminders). Then I can finally set default settings. Why on earth is this so hard to find? Why not just have it under settings where any sane person will look for it? I realize that people might want to set this differently for their different calendars, but this is the default behavior even if you only have one calendar. And what if I want the same behavior for all my calendars? Couldn’t you at least have a link under Settings?
Some caveats
First, I sound like a grumpy old man. I’m not old or grumpy, as it happens, but these are things that repeatedly irk me when I use Google products.
Secondly, as will have become clear from the above, I still use Google products a great deal – Google Reader is my default feed reader, Google Maps is my default mapping provider, and Gmail is where I get my personal email. I also use Google Calendar to track some personal calendar items. So they have me hooked regardless of these shortcomings. Clearly, they’re doing a lot right.
Lastly, some of these will come down to personal preferences – some people may love the way these things work at the moment and some will agree with me. But my plea is partly for more choices – let me choose, and if in doubt provide a link in two different places so I can find something quickly instead of having to hunt around your Help function (or worse, a web search) to find what I’m looking for.
I got a letter in the mail today from Optimum / Cablevision, our friendly local cableco. We were Cablevision customers when we first moved to the area because Verizon’s FiOS service, which we had known and loved in Boston before we moved, was not available yet. We had broadband and TV from them and phone from Verizon. When FiOS duly arrived in our area, we signed up for the triple play from Verizon and ditched Cablevision without further thought.
Since that time we’ve received the odd piece of mail from Cablevision (”some FiOS customers are not getting what they thought they signed up for”, “wish you hadn’t switched?” etc.) and the other day a Brazilian guy doing door to door sales for the company showed up too.
But the letter that arrived today was a bit different. It appears Cablevision is tired of my refusal to come back to them and has decided to start with the scare tactics instead… I’ve embedded a small version of the letter below but click here for a large image and here for a PDF (both are scans of the original).
My wife brought me the letter in my office and just laughed about it. “Oh no, our house is going to burn down because of our FiOS service!” she said. She saw it for what it was – scare tactics, pure and simple. But would other customers? Would this work? And are they sending this to everyone, or just people like me that have said no too many times to the straight pitch?
Here’s the full text:
Dear Neighbor,
New York Public Safety Commission Inspectors have found that “a high proportion” – over 50% – of Verizon’s FiOS installations in customer homes had failed to adhere to some of the bonding and grounding provisions of the National Electrical Code (NEC); the Commission has ordered Verizon to undertake a comprehensive remedial plan. The NY State Attorney General’s office – supporting the Commission’s action – had also noted that many customers were unaware of the potential risks involved in these faulty installations.
State inspectors first found grounding problems in the spring of 2006. They discovered that some FiOS equipment – Optical Network Terminals, or ONTs – had been grounded to heating fuel-vent pipes and plastic pipe elbows, or were not grounded at all. The PSC report noted that improperly grounded electrical equipment can cause fires or electrocution in the event of equipment failure or lightning strikes. PSC inspectors found similar problems in a series of subsequent audits through the summer of 2008. Although Verizon has now improved its code compliance on new installations, a significant number of faulty installations still remain and, under Verizon’s plan, might not be fixed until May 2009. Verizon customers’ FiOS installations in areas that have yet to be addressed are still at risk for these bonding and grounding faults.
As an alternative, Cablevision offers our popular Optimum Triple Play which includes TV, High Speed Internet and Unlimited Calling in the US, Puerto Rico and Canada [why they think I need to know about Puerto Rico and Canada, or any area outside of the New York area, I have no idea] for just $29.95 a month each for two years with FREE professional installation. And there are no annual contracts.
For more information or to order the Optimum Triple Play, please call 1-866-***-****. Our sales representatives will be happy to help you, 7 days a week, 7am-midnight.
Thank you,
Kathy Filosa
Vice President
Note, no mention of them actually removing Verizon’s ONT, so one assumes this actually does nothing to solve the underlying problem, should there be one in the first place. Since Verizon’s fiber installations are permanent (i.e. no going back to copper) I don’t believe Verizon would ever take it away anyway, so by cancelling I’m probably even less likely to have them come and rectify the issue than if I at least remained a customer…
