As we live in storming times of global recession and frightening ghosts of a new crisis wave are coming to our nightmares a lot of judgment on telecommunication industry reliability to global crisis were issued. Here is the quote by Martin Creaner TM Forum President introduction article published in annual industry prospectives overview.
Communications along with everyone else has suffered from the deep recession, although compared to some industries it held up well. The perception of communications services as vital to everyday life has largely spared our industry from the blows that have been dealt to banking, automotive, retail, travel and other market sectors.
I don't completely dismiss the idea stated by respective expert but have a slightly different view on industry relatively string performance during last year.
I do believe that good performance have nothing to do with industry recognition as vital for human being. Retail and real estate are at least same important.
In my opinion the reason is an industry shift from providing facilities to subscriber entertainment becoming more and more obvious at least for me. Of course at the moment traditional voice services and business services like IP VPNs are taking over the pure entertainment in terms of revenue but this doesn't call off the trend.
Entertainment was always industry performing rather well in the hardest times as people are seeking for escape more in the situations their future doesn't look very promising. During the Great Depression the movie industry showed stable growth as the cinema was the best place to hide from fears of unemployment and poverty. Every social instability is always turn in operators incomes as people feel increased need in trading roomers, relatives supports, following news in order to decrease the disturbing feeling of uncertainty.
Shift to entertainment is a topic I'm going to come back in future posts.
P.S
I realize that at the moment my blog will be mostly talking to myself but I'll be very happy if some one read the post and leave some mark in the comment.
Hi Ivan. You probably refer to some specific markets, when you claim the telecom to be an entertainment provider... Looking at the market in which you and work (or used to work), I don't see any entertainment provided by Ukrainian operators. They give you an ability to talk and browse with very poor quality. Not much fun at all))) Industries like telecom are not dead perhaps because people do not save on communicating (yet), they save on bigger stuff like rent, cars, land. And instead of a new range rover you always dreamed about you go out and buy yourself a new mobile handset to chat or that fancy new fridge to store beers. IMHO)
ReplyDeleteDon't forget that when there is a crisis in any area that usually means the area has become mature enough. For the area professionals it means that there won't be any substantial breakthroughs, since it's become an enabler. What matters is applications. Google has shown and proven that people don't really care about technologies, they care about what they can do.
ReplyDeleteYears have passed since a mobile phone was a fancy thing, a guy having it won't make a call unless to show off. Now if you forgot at home, the day is lost. Good example: doesn't matter how good your cellphone is, what matters is whether or not i'm going to be able to transmit the voice information over it.
Who cares what livejournal uses - PHP, Perl, C++, C# or burn shell? I don't know and it never comes to my mind. But i use it to propagate my ideas.
Same goes for telecom - this is just an enabler technology.