Google Already Seems to Have Learned Something about Access in Kansas City

Some say Google is backing off its commitment to provide wholesale access to third parties as part of its 1-Gbps Kansas City network. Early on, Google seemed to believe it would offer third parties access, but it might be that Google already has learned how difficult it actually is to make business with an advanced fiber-to-home network.

Google might have concluded that any realistic hopes of operating the network as an money-making enterprise, as well as its hope to encourage lots of application innovation, might only be possible if Google acts as a retail provider and reaps all the revenue.

Also, if the point is to create a test bed for new applications, Google might now be concluding that it will learn more if it takes a more direct and active role in sponsoring such applications. One of the problems with operating as a wholesale provider is that you don't actually learn very much about what retail customers want, and are doing, because you don't actually have those customers.

Some think the wholesale approach would have been more interesting, as GigaOm tends to argue. But some might say the realities of the fiber to the home business now are clearer. As other triple-play service providers can well attest, offering such services in a competitive market, and Kansas City already has strong, entrenched cable and telco providers, is difficult.

If Google only wanted to create a "test bed," and didn't mind losing quite a lot of money, a wholesale approach might be feasible.

Utopia, an open access network operated by 16 municipalities in Utah, is among those entities trying to prove that a wholesale model can work, commercially.

Google might not believe it can learn as much, much less turn a profit, without offering and managing a retail service, allowing it to work with partners to test new services directly.

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

The federal government calculates the deficit in a way that makes the number smaller than if standard accounting rules were followed (in trillions). Deficits are far worse than the Federal government reports, in other words. 


For only the fiscal year of 2011, the actual deficit was $5 trillion, not $1.3 trillion, as the executive branch reports. The same was true in 2010. 


Decades ago, some policy advocates would have argued that "deficits don't matter." These days, when governments at virtually every level, all over the world, are borrowing money to finance current deficits, that isn't true any longer. Deficits do matter, and everywhere. 

Communications Both Helps, Hinders "Work"

Dealing with on-the-job distractions is a constant part of every marketing professional's day, according to a new survey by The Creative Group.

Ad and marketing executives surveyed say the longest they can work on a task without being interrupted is 30 minutes, on average, according to the study. 


As you might guess, it also takes some time to get back to whatever task it was that any respondent was working on, before the interruption.
The most common culprits of on-the-job distractions are people stopping by to chat and phone calls, cited by 27 percent and 26 percent of ad and marketing execs, respectively.

Such distractions, one might argue, are the downside of “always connected”  communications. In a sense, one value “presence” features offer is the saving of time wasted trying to find and communicate with people. The flip side of all our enhanced communications, though, is the risk of even more interruptions, from more channels, than ever before.

That is probably why many professionals who work away from the office say they get more actual work done. Approximately 69 percent of the employees surveyed by Cisco cited higher  productivity when working remote, and 75 percent of those surveyed said the timeliness of their work improved.

Of course, communications are essential for those telecommuting workers, just as it would be for at the office workers. But communications can aid or hinder “work,” it can be argued. 

Groupon, Facebook Moves Show Complexity of Advertising Ecosystems

Groupon is said to be testing its own mobile-assisted mobile payments service, using a dongle that provides cred card swiping capability for a smart phone. Separately, Facebook now is rumored to be exploring a purchase of mobile browser Opera.

Both moves show the complexity of the mobile ad business these days. PayPal, a traditional online payments supplier, now is getting into the offline retail point of sale business. But that is only part of the effort. PayPal sees targeted advertising and loyalty programs, as well as in-store promotion as parts of the changing mobile commerce business.

In that business, the actual payments process is only part of the overall range of operations that are potential parts of the mobile shopping business.

That's why Groupon might be beefing up its actual payments capability, while Facebook might get into the mobile browser or even mobile phone business. Platforms are better able to maximize the value of an advertising or loyalty business.

Is Facebook Going to Get into the Mobile Browser or even Phone Business?

Rumors about Facebook creating its own smart phone are not new. Now there are rumors that Facebook is considering buying mobile browser Opera, a move that would strengthen Facebook's platform status without requiring an immediate move into the actual device business.

Separately, there are rumors Facebook is hiring engineers as part of a project to create its own smart phone.

You might ask why Facebook would want to enter competition with Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla and Yahoo. The answer is that, right or wrong, such a move would be viewed as a way of allowing Facebook to grow its status as a platform, much as Google, Apple and Amazon have done.

Keep in mind that Facebook also has talked about becoming an ad network, able to sell inventory outside Facebook. A browser would help, in that regard.

Google itself makes far more money from advertising on the iPhone than it does on its own Android devices, some would note. That suggests the rationale for an ad-supported company to control its own devices and use its own operating systems.

Could White Spaces "Revolutionize" Access?

White spaces broadband is viewed by many as an important new challenger in the broadband access business.  There are a couple of ways white spaces can be viewed. Some might see it as a potential replacement for mobile broadband, while others might see it as a replacement for fixed broadband.

It is too early to say where, or how much, either of those positions might be true. One can note any number of would-be challengers that have garnered attention over the last couple of decades.

Wi-Fi itself was once seen as a potential challenger to mobile networks. Power line technologies have been discussed for decades as a new broadband access platform. Before Sprint was born, frequencies used for educational TV (MMDS) were seen as the foundation for a new sort of "personal communications service" that would be different from "cellular telephone" service.

Metropolitan broadband using wireless techniques have been seen as rivals to telco or cable TV access services. Other wireless techniques such as that used by Ricochet Networks also were tried in the first decade of the 21st century.

The point is that any number of attempts to create new and successful broadband networks have been tried over the last couple of decades. Judging by market share, none of them have gained significant share in the market, and most have failed to get traction in the way initially forecast.

Public Wi-Fi has become important, but more as a feature of a fixed broadband or mobile broadband network, than as an alternative to cable modem, digital subscriber line or fiber to the home service.

It remains to be seen whether white spaces will fare any better than earlier efforts.

Is Apple Changing, or Not?

The inevitable question for Apple, post Steve Jobs, is whether Apple can continue to create new markets on the scale it has done in the past. It isn't an easy question to answer, if only because Apple's product roadmap tends to stretch out a ways.

So any "post-Steve" initiatives will take some time to emerge. Some might argue Apple is changing under CEO Tim Cook.

Adam Lashinksy seems to be in that camp. Jon Gruber is not.

But it wouldn't be unusual to argue that, over time, Apple's performance will regress toward the mean. The only question is how long it might take for that to happen, and how great a reversion might occur. But companies, like products, have life cycles.

Apple isn't likely to escape its own life cycle indefinitely. The next "big thing" Apple attempts might not tell the story.

If it turns out that "television" is that next big product opportunity, we might not start seeing the first real "post Steve Jobs" initiatives until one more major product category is tackled, after TV.

The reason is simply that Apple's roadmap stretches out a significant way into the future, and that Steve Jobs was an unusual leader. Few business executives in the last century have stamped their own sense of "what the market wants" on a company, rather than "responding to what the market wants."

The prevailing mantra of "listening to the customer" was not how Apple revolutionized existing markets, and created new markets. The view has been that people could not adequately determine their own desire for products and experiences with which they had zero familiarity. Few business leaders will have the "arrogance" or "insight" (depending on how one wishes to view the matter) that Steve Jobs did.

That is not to say Jobs did not form a company culture with distinctive characteristics. But neither does the impact of a distinctive  company culture remain constant over long periods of time. HP, 3M, IBM, AT&T and all other sufficiently-large firms also have cultures.

You might question whether the core values and cultures have been maintained, in business-driving ways, over time. People, companies, products and countries evolve over time. It seems unlikely Apple will "forever" escape that aging process.