Users. Just like wives and sweethearts, you can’t live with them, but you can’t live without them

Arguably all of the previous four categories of Redux participants listed in the course of this week's series – new carriers, ICT vendors, regulators and even ICT shareholders – have targeted end-users as their ultimate goal. If users are happy, so too are those who crouch at the most remote corners of the industry dynamic. If users are happy, so are those in the supply chain that feeds and serves them.

It would be magnificent to think that a cornucopia of choice and new services was now being made available to end users. Sadly, this is another case of 'spot the flying pig'.

If truth be told, the technology sector has no great track-record when it comes to innovation. Sounds surprising? In almost a century it managed to come up with hard-wired voice, the telex, the telegram and (belatedly) the fax. A handful of slowly evolving technologies and armies of human employees allowed this to happen.

Against this backdrop of glacial development, a handful of death-defying new technologies have changed the landscape and have changed lives. The PC, the Internet, broadband and the mobile are four good examples of this. Beyond that? Only the territory reserved for anoraks and the devotees of acronyms. This presents a huge problem for technologists and a difficulty of interpretation for end-users, who after all represent the intended market for these developments.

The gist of the problem is that the overwhelming majority of new technologies do not break any moulds or shift any paradigms. Instead, they tend to be better, neater and more efficient ways of doing the same old things that users have been doing all along.

You can immediately see how such a description would stick in the craw of a new technology hypester. Things like neatness and efficiency point, so far as end users can see, to a product or service that is also cheaper.

Big or small
Thus ordinary consumers and small users find themselves on the receiving end of an endless spiral of industry ‘upsell’. And here Moore’s Law lets us down: while capability expands to heights that would make an exponentialist giddy, prices are stuck in treacle as far as the user is concerned. The price component of Moore’s Law is being fed into margins, rather than the actual price. This suggests that technology manufacturers are not stupid and users, perhaps, are.

Large end users fare little better: they find themselves on the receiving end of a new brand of double-talk. The telco and equipment supplier mantra used to say (in the 1990s) that large companies should concentrate on their core business while leaving ICT to ‘the professionals’. Doubters countered that, in almost every modern industry, ICT was inseparable from the core business.

Now, beleaguered operators and suppliers feel the same pain as their multinational end user customers in ways that they would never have imagined and are saying as much. ‘Bang for the buck’ is the watchphrase at either end of the supply-demand chain.

What has happened is that ICT-reliant industries (and that means most of them) look and behave like telcos or software companies in their grappling with technology.

Worse still, much of the choice and hence the price pressures that briefly flourished in the late 1990s have gone. Corporates have fewer reliable suppliers to choose from after the fall-out from the bust. Dream offers that surfaced when competition first dug in turned out to be just that: dreams. If not nightmares.

Redux? For a user it’s a question of scale, timing and balance – and for supplier it’s a question of balance sheets.
Jim Chalmers

An abridged version of the State of the Redux series with additional summaries and conclusions will appear in the Features section next week. Look out also for a new series starting next week: 'C21 Telco', which looks at the success (or otherwise) with which incumbent telcos have evolved.