Are connectivity products tangible or intangible? Are they products a customer can see and touch or are they services whose quality and experiences must be purchased first, before they can be evaluated?
The answers matter, as intangible products require proxies for value, since the customer actually has no way of examining or testing the “product” before buying it. That is why brand is so important, or the quality of customer service.
Customers must use such proxies for value as a way of evaluating potential suppliers, and that arguably goes for connectivity service providers as well.
Some might argue connectivity is "tangible." Well, routes are quantifiable, so perhaps tangible in some sense. Addresses are tangible. Physical locations are tangible. Perhaps quoted capacity is tangible. Compute cycles are quantifiable.
But perhaps those attributes are similar to aircraft, crews and landing rights when people buy "air travel." Buyers might need compute cycles, access to certain buildings and locations and capacity at certain levels. But that is the equivalent of aircraft, departure frequencies, crews and landing rights.
No customer can really judge, before buying, the "quality" provided by one connectivity provider, compared to another, or one computing services host, compared to another. Computing and connectivity remain "intangible" products.
No comments:
Post a Comment