Alec Saunders SquawkBox

It’s done.  Or, as done as it’s going to be, anyway.  The blog is migrated, and I am not going to do a whole lot more work on fixing up old posts. In honour of the occasion, Alec Saunders .LOG has been renamed:  Res Ipsa Loquitur is a Latin phrase meaning "The thing speaks for itself". I think that’s pretty fitting for my personal soapbox. 

Hope you all enjoy it, and continue to read. 

I am an enthusiastic user of LinkedIn, as I’ve written in the past.  Their latest feature is great!  It allows you to reconnect with colleagues you worked with by presenting potential candidates who worked in the same organization as you during the same period.  Today I reconnected with Vince Perriello, who spent 10 years working on Microsoft Exchange middleware components, and is now the Technology and Data Services Manager at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky. 

Mike Zintel’s team has just launched .NET Compact Framework in Las Vegas. 

Ron Gruia wrote a comment to my May 13th posting about the CRTC ruling, way back when I wrote the actual post.  It got trapped in WordPress’ authorization mechanism, for which I apologize Ron.  I didn’t even realize that it was there until today!

Ron’s assertion is that price is an element of competition, and the CRTC should not remove this tool from the ILEC arsenal, since the MSO’s have obvious market power and could choose to price predatorily against the ILECs.  In a pure commodity market-place, such would be absolutely true.  Generalizing, I contend that technology markets move rapidly, but consumers of voice services have only seen the benefit of those advances on one plane — price.

Fans of Clayton Christiansen’s The Innovators Dilemma will recognize the diagram below.  It shows the progression of competition from functionality to reliability to convenience to a commodity based competition based solely on price. That’s where we are today.  VoIP has the potential to either reset the cycle, and restore innovation as the basis for competition, or take us further down the price curve.  The CRTC apparently believes that unless they remove the incumbent’s pricing power, the reset to innovation won’t happen. Their decision forces Canadian ILECs to confront the Innovators Dilemma head-on, because the choice to compete on price alone would be their destruction.

It’s a bold strategy, to be sure, and as Ron and others point out, it’s not a strategy without risk.  The risk is that the incumbents can’t respond, and are destroyed in the subsequent price war.