Forum Archive Index - May 2000

["Nigel Bree" <nbree@kcbbs.gen.nz>]

Mike Nelson wrote:
> You sound awfully like an Alliance voter.

Don't be silly. Anyone who has had to suffer in the tech business while
Telecom strangled our national infrastructure by charging monopoly rents for
data services will have an equally low opinion of Telecom, and the
regulatory structure which let them extort from us.

Loathing for them and their bullshit transcends politics.

There's a wonderful book called the "Innovator's Dilemma" about how
companies in markets with aggressive technological development have to deal
with the fact that they *have* to price their new products such that they
cannibalize sales of their old ones - it offers a compelling model for how
the hard drive industry has worked during the 1980s and 1990s. Well worth a
read.

Alas, we in New Zealand have not been fortunate enough to get the full
benefit of data technology, because Telecom have been almost perfectly
insulated from the destablilising price effects of that technology. For just
one example of many, look at their pricing of ISDN - if they had not made
the "mistake" of offering the Centrex service (something they tried to pull
from the market once it became apparent that ISPs could use it) I think it's
fair to say Internet use in NZ would be much, much lower.



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