AT&T wants to charge you $200 a month.

Posted by Tom on June 7, 2010

Some of you may have seen my recent techblog article regarding AT&T’s newly- announced data plans. Well, here is the story behind the story.

If you take the time to dig into the details, you will find that AT&T actually has the moral high ground on this one. Unfortunately, they succumed to the temptation to abuse that priveledge, and in doing so demonstrated exactly What Not to Do.

AT&T claims that 3% of all users consume 40% of their network bandwidth. Of this I have no doubt. Ever gone to an all-you-can eat buffet? Ever stood there behind some guy piling more food on his plate than the entire country of Somalia eats in a year? Need I say more? Whenever you give away something in an unlimited fashion, you will always get some abuse. You see, big corporations are not the only ones who succumb to temptation. We all can. It’s simply human.

Mark my words, $200/month phone bills will be commonplace in less than 3 years.

So AT&T may be justified in wanting to curb the abuse of their unlimited data plan by 3% of their subscribers, but they may have gone too far when they degrade the opportunities for the other 97% of their customers. You see, you should never hurt your target customers, not even when you are trying to control rogue customers. In the short run, AT&T may have a problem with some small percentage of their customer base, but believe me, this is not the real reason they are acting now.

So what is AT&T really doing? Well, two things. But only one will hit home anytime soon. The other one won’t become obvious for some time. And that is what makes it so potentially sinister. Read on.

The first thing AT&T has done is just plain stupid. In creating the new limited data plans, they require all customers to pay an extra $20/mo for tethering [when available at all]. Given that the customer is already being hit for every byte of data they use, it seems oppressive and capricious to hit them again for another 20 bucks merely for the privilege of being abused.

The second, hidden, effect of this pricing approach won’t be seen until far into the future. And I’m sure this is the REAL reason AT&T is going to eliminate ALL unlimited data plans from existence:

They want to charge us all $200/mo for our phones.

Yep you heard me right. 200 bucks a month. EVERY month.

Let me explain. Sure 97% of us only use 2GB of data or less each month. TODAY. But a few years ago the mere thought of sucking that much data out of the air was laughable. Now it’s not. Why? Cause things change that’s why. Networks get faster. Hardware gets better and cheaper. Encryption algorithms get more sophisticated. To assume this trend will not continue far into the future would be ridiculous. Of course it will. And AT&T is fully aware of this. That’s why they want to draw a line in the sand now; they are setting us up to pay $200 a month for our phones. But not just our phones. Each phone we own. And not just each phone. Anything that touches their network. And in the future…everything will touch a network.

So, do you begin to see the sheer magnitude of this?

In the not-so-distant future, it will be possible and simple to watch hi-def television on every device you own, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from hundreds of channels and other forms of online content providers. There is no way in Hell AT&T and all the other carriers are not going to try to get in on that bonanza. That’s why unlimited data plans are being eliminated. NOT because of the 3% of people abusing the network today, but because of the potential to extract boatloads of cash from the 97% of us regular folk who will want to consume much, much more than the paltry 2GB AT&T is allowing in their “top tier” data plan now.

Mark my words, $200/mo. phone bills will be commonplace in less than 3 years.

Just wait until, not too far in the future, you are paying $200 a month for each of these:

  • Your cellphone
  • Your spouse’s cellphone
  • Your home phone/Internet/data service
  • Your kid’s phones

When I was a kid, my family had one phone. It was on the wall in the kitchen. It did not get used much, mostly only when necessary. We had one phone bill. Probably somewhere around $20/month. Now my wife and I each have a phone. We still have a home phone for fax, alarm, etc. We have separate Internet service, along with separate bills for each. Then come the kids. Yada Yada Yada. You get the picture.

Sure people make more money now. But as a percentage of the average person’s income, the cost for typical telecommunications has and will continue to skyrocket.

Because that is exactly The Plan.

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Never promise what you can’t deliver

Posted by Tom on May 28, 2010

OK..it’s been over 5 months now, and I’m still waiting for the “impending” launch of the JooJoo tablet. So much bluster from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame. So much “I’m a victim” from Fusion Garage’s Chandra Rathakrishnan. So much of so many things that simply don’t matter. And way too much of one thing which is woefully absent in business today…integrity.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the “fight”, to get fired up by the other guy’s words, to forget that there is only one reason you get to be successful ultimately in business. And that reason is, that somewhere, someone cares. Not about you. But about what you provide to or for THEM. Those people are your customers. Too many business people today seem to forget that is exactly why they schlep into work every morning. Not to have fun. Not to make money. Not to screw around. Yes, those are laudable side-effects of a thriving business and often times get more than their share of blog postings and media attention. But the real reason we are all here, day in and day out, is to make your customer ecstatic about our products and/or services. Without that, none of those other things would ever exist.

None.

So the next time you here someone talk about how great something is, and about how you’ll be seeing it Real Soon Now, remember, talk is cheap.

If you aren’t sure, just as Mike Arrington. I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it.

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Don’t shoot the kid…look beyond the headlines

Posted by Tom on April 30, 2010

So everybody is looking to find out who “stole” the new iPhone prototype from a bar last week. Here is the latest.

Turns out, the “thief” is a 20-something kid who found the prototype for the new 4G iPhone in a bar, realized what it was, knew it was valuable, and thought he’d make a few bucks selling it to Gizmodo for the scoop.

The Cretan.

Yes, we all know theft is a bad thing, and profiting from someone else’s misfortune is not good. But let’s get real here for a minute. This was a KID. What would you expect him to do? Promptly turn the item over to the local authorities? Come on. He wanted his 15 minutes of fame, and he went for it. Not very imaginative [I would have negotiated for the movie rights], but who can fault him…really…for this? Especially at his age.

…you should not be able to encourage theft by paying for stolen property and profiting by that purchase.

But who is really at fault here? I think you should look beyond the hype, and think about who stood to gain and lose and then consider their motivations. Surely if there were no rags like Gizmodo out there, willing to pay for something they KNEW was stolen in order to get a “scoop”, nobody could sell such an item. I don’t give a rip that this was “news”; you should not be able to encourage theft by publicly paying for known stolen property and profiting by that purchase. If anything should be illegal, that should be. Yet I’ve heard no admonishments for Gizmodo. If anything, they are cooler because they did this. Shameful.

And what about Apple? Steve Jobs, famous for his heavy-handed, paranoid, and Orwellian antics, should be ashamed of himself. Really. Yep, Steve, one of your minions screwed up. Your impenetrable shield of silence was broken. Big friggin deal. You need to get over it and move on. The mature thing to do would be to say “Yep, you got me on that one.”, and take steps to reduce the possibility in the future without sending your personal police force to kick in the door of a 20-year old boy who exercised poor judgement.

And last, but certainly not at all least, what about the Apple engineer who lost the iPhone prototype in the first place? What exactly was this valuable piece of hardware doing in a bar? Not just in a bar, but out in the open? Come on. We all know what happened here. This engineer had one of these babies, and he was just dying to show it to his non-Apple buddies. He takes it to a bar, gets all liquored up, and then starts boasting about how he and Stevie-boy dreamed the whole idea for the iPhone up; how he was the real genius behind Apple. And to prove it, he whips out the proto, something few people in the world had access to. He must have been the coolest guy in that bar…that is, until he went to relieve himself in the bathroom, and passed out face down in the urinal.

If anybody is at fault here, it’s that guy. He is [or perhaps, was] an Apple employee en-charged with the secure handling of valuable Apple proprietary equipment, and he took it to a bar and showed it to people. That’s the only way it could have gotten left there.

So why are we chasing down the 20-year old kid who found it?

We have to be willing to either do the right thing, or fess up and face the music when we don’t. The rest is just emotional and ethical immaturity.

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Dealing with rejection

Posted by Tom on April 12, 2010

As the grey-haired man in the single’s bar soon finds out, rejection is a tough thing to deal with. How we handle it defines us perhaps more than anything else. For me, I’m not inclined to run for the Grecian Formula, but I’m also not as thick-skinned as I would like to be. Especially now.

I wrote my first book, What Not to Do, in a flash. It was a fun ride, taking me only about 3-4 months to complete the entire 60,000 word first draft. And the first draft is pretty good, close to what I could be proud of as a final draft. Yet, since then I have spent at least 4 more months trying to figure out how to navigate the traditional book publishing maze, and gotten nearly nowhere.

To date, I’ve submitted by book proposal to one, count it, ONE literary agent. She required an “exclusive” submission, meaning I could not send the proposal to anybody else until she had the chance to review it.

It took her a whopping 9 weeks to look it over and send me a [very nicely worded] rejection letter.

Now I know these folks are busy, but if they all expect me to wait 2-3 months to get told “thanks, but no thanks”… and do it ONE AT A TIME…then I can understand why self publishing has garnered such an appeal. I hate to wait. I hate rejection. Combine the two, and I’m not likely to dance to this tune much longer.

My next step? Well you can rest assured I’m not waiting around for 4 more months to hear “nope” from one self-proclaimed expert. I’m going right to the horse’s mouth. I’m mass-submitting my book proposal to a ton of publishers, literary agents, and whoever else will listen…all at once. Then, after say 4-6 months, if I have not gotten any real interest and traction, I’m publishing this puppy myself.

I feel too strongly about the issues I speak of in my book, and have worked too damn hard for it all to end up as a pile of papers in my desk drawer.

Not going to happen.

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How not to rent DVDs

Posted by Tom on March 4, 2010

I thought I’d recall for you my recent experiences with Netflix. I really love this service, but in the past few months I’ve been concerned about the quality of service delivery I’m getting. Specifically, I routinely get DVDs which are unplayable. I would estimate that, on average, one out of every five DVDs I get are unplayable to some extent.

It’a real pain to get a DVD you can’t play. Especially if you have been planning to watch a movie, and there is nothing else you want to watch. You are essentially stuck. I have been able to copy some of the DVDs using my computer, but that is a huge pain in the butt to do, only to play them once and throw the DVD in the trash. I would much rather simply have Netflix do their jobs better and send me a playable DVD.

Whenever I get a DVD which is unplayable, I simply turn it over and look at the unlabeled side, and guess what? It’s usually scratched up like Hell. Sometimes there is actually dirt, or smudges, or snot, or God-knows-what on it, and I can clean it and get it to play. But most of the time when this happens, I’m out of luck.

Here is what I believe Netflix needs to do to improve upon this issue:

Netflix surely knows how many times EVERY DVD has been sent out. But, they do not know much more. They do not know how many times it has been played by any one customer [but my guess is ONCE], or how it was handled. But there is one thing they DO know, and if they used that information, their DVD replacement algorithm could be greatly improved.

The Netflix DVD replacement algorithm can be improved by considering the following:

I have noticed that, of all the unplayable discs I’ve gotten, most of them are extremely popular movies. In fact, the most damaged discs seem to be of movies that younger adults and/or children would like. Movies like Harry Potter, or Star Trek. Certainly not documentaries, or lesser-known indie movies.

But why should this be? Certainly Netflix has an algorithm that trashes a DVD after a certain number of shipments regardless of genre, right? Well, that is EXACTLY the problem. If you use the SAME number of shipments to indicate replacement for movies that children or young adults watch as you do for, lets’ say, more “mature adults”, I think Netflix is making a big mistake. They need to take into account genre and age of the intended viewer because WHO will be handling the DVD is important. Believe me, adults are not loading and unloading DVD players for their kids…the kids are doing it…and they are not going to be as careful as older folks are. Period.

So, in addition to how many shipments a DVD has undergone, I recommend Netflix modulate this metric with one that takes into account the genre and the intended viewer’s age. The lower this “target age”, the less shipments a DVD gets before it is either inspected or trashed. That’s it. Pretty simple IMHO.

If Netflix does this, their quality of service and customer SAT should shoot up. If they don’t, they will be simply another company willfully practicing What Not to Do.

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