Brazil, Russia, India and China Driving Growth

In 2007, Hewlett Packard earned 67 percent of its total revenue outside the U.S. market. In the fourth quarter along, Asia-Pacific grew by 20 percent, Europe, Middle East and Africa by 19 percent and the Americas region was up by 10 percent. The Brazil, Russia, India and China group grew 37 percent year over year in the fourth quarter. Growth rates of that sort are one reason new submarine cables are being laid between North America and the Far East, and being planned or talked about between Europe and India. Add mobile phones to the growth of PC and associated electronics and it is clear Asia, the Middle East and Africa is where the growth is, at least in terms of mobile and other sorts of communications.

Of course, there are other reasons for laying additional cables across the Pacific. Earthquakes are capable of taking out multiple cables and routes in an instant, so carriers logically want more redundancy on trans-Pacific routes than has been the case up to this point.

Disruption? Maybe Not.

Lots of companies and lots of people have been at the "telecom disruption" game for quite some time, beginning way back with the Carterfone decision and MCI's assault on the long distance calling market. We have had Internet service providers, competitive local exchange carriers, hosted service providers, application providers, instant messaging providers, portals, VoIP providers, cable companies, satellite providers and others attacking one part or another of the global telecom value chain.

Through it all, global communications service revenue has kept climbing. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find any year when that didn't happen. Perhaps the issue is not disruption at all, but rather transformation. There will be new spaces created, and a rearrangement of older spaces. But nothing has stopped global revenue from climbing, year after year.

Of course, all the analysts could be wrong. Some cataclysm could yet await. But it sure doesn't appear to be something you would build your company on.

Voice Continues Wireless Shift

Wireless access "lines" not only outnumber wired lines by a three to one margin, wireless accounts now blow away wired lines in terms of growth, say researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Which explains the attention now paid to seamless experiences in either the voice or Web realms. If so many people are going to spend so much time in mobile settings, then the things they might do on a PC or desktop phone have to be available on their mobile devices. Ideally, the context a user expects in a stationary or tethered experience also would be replicated in the mobile context as well. Price, while always a factor in a buying decision, is a matter of "hygiene."

If the price is wrong, no sale occurs. But price is not something that can make a user happy. Think of price as something that instead prevents a user from being "unhappy."

But even the right price makes a user "happy." The things that make users happy are on a different plane, entirely. Coolness, features, form factor, user interface and lots of other things people find they can do with a service and device are the essential parameters for driving "happiness." And the attempt to find "happiness" is what drives the purchase.

If you want people to buy something you make, you have to remember that "happiness" and "hygiene" are not on the same continuum. There are two different scales, and you have to be on the right side of each scale.