Seth Godin asks if he’s the only one who’d pay for HiDefenition voice. Normally I love what Seth writes but in this case, the answer to the question is pretty much yes – virtually no-one wants to pay for good quality telephone calls.
Say what you will about the phone company but AT&T and BT have a wealth of understanding about how to make telephone calls sound good. The theory is well understood and any voice codec comes with a standardised score which will tell you in advance how good it will sound. Today BT will sell you a very high quality VoIP service – problem is no-one wants to pay for it. Consumers have voted with their wallets and they’ve said no.
I sit in meetings every month where very smart engineers talk about how to design the network to support great voice products, all the while taking calls on their mobile phones which sound like you’re talking from the bottom of a well. GSM defines high quality voice codecs for 3G – no mobile company has every succeeded in selling these.
There are many cases where people pay for quality but usually it’s because the standard offering is pretty awful. But though we remember lots of bad quality phone calls, most of the time it’s perfectly adequate. Voice just isn’t that bad today.
I listened to a great harvard podcast the other day about the social contract in relation to business. The concept was simple – in times past companies would look after you beyond simply paying you. In return you would be flexible about how you delivered value and more loyal than otherwise.
This wasn’t a job for life scenario. Companies allowed a myriad of small things which technically they shouldn’t: use of company phones and photocopiers fit personal business; a nod and a wink at the length if your lunch break; trust in your expens report.
What they got were people who took a little mire than they technically shoud, but never overtly stole. When crunch time came employees would work the extra hours and not complain. They’d answer their mobiles on a Saturday.
Now companies are cracking down on all these small niceties exactly when they are also asking employees to take haircut on raises and salary. It’s working because people need their jobs and the bottom line is always easy to bump by a few percent in a push.
But what happens in three years? Rosy scenario is we’re growing again: jobs are easy to find and money is available.
I predict employees will desert these ‘efficient’ companies at the drop of a hat. They’ve shown they dont care about you so why should you care about them?
So why shoud companies care? It’s all business anyway right?
They should care because the old way was a great deal. For fifty bucks a month on tax deductible sundries they got an extra ten hours a month out of execs and people willing to work Saturday. Now they’ve saved their six hundred dollars a year but productivity has dropped – people who went on a five thousand dollar course leave for a competitor – that’s eight years of savings down the drain and you need to find a new person and bring them up to speed.
The above video is Geoffrey Canada talking about how America fails it’s black children, and how cheap it would be to fix the situation when they’re young versus spending millions to lock them up later. Truly inspirational.
Sometimes you make a mistake and just dread picking up the phone to fix things. I just did that. I messed up (by one day) the date I meant to return from France by Eurotunnel.
Naturally I’d bought the cheapest possible ticket with “no changes or refunds” allowed. How did the friendly gentleman I spoke to deal with this?
He offered to change to the same time on the correct day but unfortunately, it was going to cost an additional £6 – not a fee – just how much I’d have paid if I got the booking right. 30 seconds of credit card details later and I’m all done – no hassle, no fuss, no issue.
Eurotunnel is one of those weird travel providers, like Easyjet, who secretly give you all kinds of extra stuff – if you turn up early at the Eurotunnel terminal, you can generally just catch an earlier train – miss yours and you’re mostly just allowed to drift on to the next one. It’s wonderful and exactly what you’d expect they’re able to do.
Similarly, easyjet let you catch an earlier return flight for free – if you’re flying to London you can even pick any flight going to any of the London airports.
Great service and I end up a happy customer.
It’s easy to hate George Bush – he took the world into a war that seems pointless and on his watch the economic stability we built our lives on vanished in months.
Though I’ve always had this feeling that he couldn’t be that stupid. He may have made the wrong decisions, but I never bought into the “Bush as idiot” type thinking. Nor could I buy the “He’s just in it for the oil” factors.
So reading the Iraq war as Poker article was strangely comforting. Though it presents a sensible theory of Bush betting the world on his theory and risk analysis – it somehow seems structured if not sensible. Read it yourself and see if you can see a theory of why the man did what he did. It’s trivial to monday morning quarterback him and god knows we’re better off with Obama, but we can’t dismiss him as completely as we have.
Apple at some point must have seriously taken to heart the design mantra of “Never surprise the user”. The Mac delights because whenever you’re not sure how to do something, almost always the first thing you try works.
I’ve just had the same experience on my iPhone – with version 2.2 of the software you can download podcasts over the air instead of having to sync via your Mac. I did this and accrued a set of execrable Jimmy Carr type content (more on why he’s annoying at some point) which I simply couldn’t get rid of.
Principal of least surprise to the rescue – turns out you simply swipe across the episodes in exactly the way you delete mail – problem solved.
I contrast this with my new Blackberry Bold. Truly a great piece of design compared to my old blackberry, but they’ve simply forgotten entirely about how people will actually use the thing. It’s email is really pretty good (though it too has many annoying processes). The rest of the phone is horrible. Everything seems to take about 20 clicks and rolls on that weird little ball in the centre of the keyboard. Applications don’t seem to remember what you were doing last or remember in excruciating detail. Example:
The solitaire game included on the phone remembers the state of your game, but when you go back in, it makes you start by selecting a language and then choose to resume your game! Did they assume that my language would change in some way? That I’d want to do anything but resume playing? The contrast is my free iPhone solitaire game which simply returns you to exactly where you were last time in about 3 seconds.
The contacts application remembers exactly who you were last looking at – except the use case is never that you want to look at that person again – you look up a name to call them or e-mail them. The next time you go into contacts you want to find someone else! Again, the iPhone takes you back to the list of people, though with the name of the last person you looked at front and centre and it’s a simple tap to return to their details (Something I do in about 5% of the cases)
This is the scene on Oxford Street yesterday in the midst of the worst financial crisis the UK has had in living memory – it was, once again, impossible to move for the crush of people buying things.
