Alec Saunders SquawkBox

According to Seaboard Group (as reported by Mark Evans), Canada will have over 4 million VoIP lines by 2008.  Is that a significant number?  You bet! Bell, the largest incumbent, has about 12 million lines today.  Seaboard’s advice to incumbent telco’s hobbled by the regulator?  "Fight fire with fire".  The current cableco offerings are weak, and vulnerable to clever value added services, Seaboard believes. 

Mark Evans writes:

The research firm suggests the cablecos stay on the offensive as it will be more difficult for Bell/Telus to win back customers than it will be for the cablecos to win them in the first place. As for the independents such as Vonage and Primus, Seaboard believes it will be more difficult for them to compete. As a result, they need to keep on the marketing warpath and show consumers they can be innovative, flexible and adaptible.

Indeed.  With the current winback rules, a lost customer for Bell / Telus is a lost customer, period.  They cannot contact that customer to sell any service (including Bell’s excellent ExpressVu TV), until they have waited 12 months.  But if Rogers loses a wireless customer to Bell, Rogers can be on the telephone the next day offering bundles, discounts — whatever it will take to win the customer back. 

Unless the CRTC backs down, the only weapon the incumbents have is a dramatically superior product. 

The Stones were in Byward Market yesterday, shooting a music video.  It was all over the papers this morning.  Quite a commotion, with most of the market blocked off.  The Sun managed to report on the script of the Streets of Love video.  The Citizen’s report, meanwhile, can’t be shared because it’s behind the subscriber firewall.  However, this piece — Sympathy for the Old Devils – did appear on the Citizen’s editorial page.

Three years ago today, Joel Spolsky published this excellent essay on platform businesses.  Still relevant.

Donald Trump has published a short piece on outsourcing.  He says that in the long run, outsourcing creates jobs because increased corporate profits pump money back into the economy.  Agreed.

Outsourcing is a problem, however, for many kinds of businesses — high technology, for instance.  My company, Iotum, builds software, which is a kind of knowledge work.  Knowledge work requires constant interaction between people.  Even the most advanced communications systems available can’t substitute for the 20 minute stand-up meeting that our development team has every morning.  And, if you talk with anyone who has successfully run an offshore development project, the first requirement is to move your managers to the location of your workers. 

Protectionism is not the answer to the outsourcing problem.  Tear down the barriers to trade, bring foreign workers to America to help keep the economy growing, and focus on educating people to become knowledge workers in these critical sectors of the new economy.

But I guess that’s probably what prompted Mr. Trump’s piece in the first place.

Spotted this on the news this morning: Nortel Sheds Location Technology.  Andrews Corporation has purchased location services assets from Nortel.  Does Nortel have any other location services businesses, or are they out of this business altogether?  What does this imply for other applications businesses that Nortel is trying to build?