Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
Consumers love their mobile devices, and more to the point, love to watch funny cat videos on their mobile devices. Can you blame us? Being able to watch some fat cat struggle to get out of a Kleenex box is hilarious, and more so when watched in a crowded elevator with 20 people you have never met before. Hilarious!
This love of mobile devices, videos and cats has led wireless carriers to a strange place where they have no idea how to really serve that need. Do they allow us consumers to continue streaming hilarious cat videos when riding a crowded bus for a single, flat rate, or do they charge us per-megabyte to see a feline flail from a spinning ceiling fan while we feign interest at a function?
Tough decisions indeed.
The strategy for how to deal with this issue was laid out this week as executives from the nation’s top providers of streaming cat videos met up at an investor conference to:
1. Talk about how awesome their company is and how awesome of a job they are doing at making their company awesome.
2. Talk about how hard it is too compete in the wireless space with so many darn competitors always doing stuff that wrecks what they are trying to do.
3. Talk about how smart their current pricing model for unlimited cat streaming is and how dumb the pricing model is from their competition.
All heady topics.
To summarize, Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility – also known as the “Big 2” – charge their customers on a per-megabyte basis to watch hilarious cats in hilarious predicaments, while Sprint and T-Mobile US – also known as “The Scrappy 2” – allow customers to shoot as much milk out of their noses laughing at videos with cats playing around in bowls of milk. The Big 2 claim that the business model of the Scrappy 2 will lead to networks crashing, children crying and eventually the decimation of the cat population, while the Scrappy 2 want the Big 2 to just mind their own business as they are busy watching a cat video where cat’s play all the roles in a zombie movie.
I am all for letting carrier’s charge what they think is an appropriate amount for data services, but then again I probably do not partake in as much cat-video watching as the general populace. (I am more of a parakeet person.)
So, I find it funny when executives attempt to provide advice to their fellow island-owners in terms of how they run their networks. I am sure Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam is correct when he says that allowing customers to stream unlimited cat videos can ruin a network. But, I am also sure that Sprint execs are pretty confident they can handle that cat-video load thanks to their litter box being full of Clearwire 2.5 GHz spectrum and the fact they have half as many customers as Verizon Wireless.
I sort of like the fact that carriers are offering different rate plans for their data services, as offering up the same plans across the board only brings to light other considerations for selecting a wireless carrier that are too hard to answer? Network quality? Network coverage? Customer service? Too many variables to make for a good conversation with friends. Plus, I have a parakeet to take care of, and they have cat videos to watch.
OK, enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:
— Watching a melt-down is akin to rubber-necking when driving by a car accident. You tell yourself that you are better than that and to just keep on driving, but inevitably, you end up craning you neck to get a glimpse of the carnage. It’s human nature at its most basic core.
I have been getting that feeling lately watching a once proud BlackBerry crumble from the heights of the device and smartphone market yesterday to its place today on the cusp of being gobbled up by private investors for a mere (mere!?!) $4.7 billion. There are so many reasons why it has happened, but the fact that it is happening right in front of us and so swiftly makes it sort of hard to watch.
Not to bring any sort of pop culture into this conversation, especially one that I probably do not fully understand, but it seems that BlackBerry is having a Bieber moment where nothing it does is right and all it really wants to do is just have fun.
Maybe a private equity belt-beating is just BlackBerry needs to be whipped back into shape.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
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