In an article unfortunately not directly available online, Roben Farzad of Business Week talks about ‘AT&T’s iMess.’ That is all you need to hear to know the basic story. iPhone users love their iPhones, but they hate AT&T and are quick to say so.
Analysts are paid to commit truth, and Rich Doherty of telecom market research firm The Engineering Group has some embarrassing truth for AT&T, ‘I’m not aware of any company in this country that has had so aloof a stance toward quality of service.’
I get my landline and broadband from AT&T, and have no problem with them. But I have none of the warm and fuzzy feelings I have toward my computer or software. Bandwidth is a classic commodity good, without distinctiveness, something you only notice when it isn’t available or reliable. But it can’t be good for a company when the only buzz it is getting is about bad service.
In other news, people talk about having thousands of tunes on their iPods, and they can’t have bought them all from the iTunes Store at 99 cents a pop. Lee Gomes at Forbes lets the cat out of the bag. Content piracy remains pervasive – and in fact the industry depends on it.
People find music to play on all those iPods. And Gomes cites one representative from a computer maker that produces high end home theater setups, who admits that they are used mainly for viewing illegally downloaded movies.
Also in Gomes’ sights, ’some newspaper publishers’ – read Rupert Murdoch – who complain about Google. People don’t need Google News to read stuff lifted from Rupert’s rags; there are a million gossip and political blogs happy to provide it. And if they didn’t, how many readers would pay for it?
The underlying truth is that we have no problem paying to use the Internet. Mobile or landline, we pay every month, and only complain if the service is bad. What we won’t do, except in exceptional cases, is pay a second time to see particular content.
And yes, my implied stance here, which is that of most Internet users, creates an impossible business model. But if content is king, the customer is emperor, and the users will likely win in the end.
Also the article is worth reading just for the wind-up quote from William Watkins, former CEO of disk drive maker Seagate, about the content his products are used to store. ‘We’re not changing the world,’ said Watkins. ‘We’re building a product that helps people buy more crap–and watch porn.’
Of course, that is a way to change the world, too. It worked for a tech entrepreneur named Johannes Gutenberg.