Blog by Paul Golding

I was impressed by the following paragraph from the competition rules:

The first can follow a recipe. The second can vary the recipe a little to add something extra. The third can create a new recipe from scratch. And the fourth, a rare breed, can create a whole "new language" of cooking, by which we can think of a new cuisine.

Many projects in industry are run along the lines of the first two - i.e. mostly me-too products and services with little variation. Without doubt, this is the dominant capability of the telecoms industry. If I walk into a high-street mobile shop today, of course the devices are more advanced (e.g. music phones, iPhone), but the product is essentially the same as 10 years ago - buy a tariff.

In fact, it's still a remarkably crummy experience overall. The customer is made to feel like just another anonymous consumer off the street, even if he or she has been a customer of the store owner for years. Very little attempt to match the service/product to the customer. Then again, with hundreds of tariff/product variants, this is hardly surprising, although maybe that's a vector for innovation in itself. Is it possible to use recommendation technology in a store?

This is stunning complacency in such a competitive industry. It's not as if it can't be done better. Walk into any Apple store. Try using the genius bar, as I have. Short of offering coffee and biscuits, which I think they should, it's hard to imagine a better experience. And what audacity, calling it a genius bar. But these guys really are experts. Interestingly, a similar experience is now to be had in B&Q where they have strived to put experts in the aisles. Walk down the plumbing aisle and you're likely to bump into a member of staff who was a plumber for 30 years and can tell a sprigget from a sprocket, or whatever. No surprise that B&Q dominates the DIY market.

How can the telco industry, with its massive resources and revenues, fail to innovate, except, perhaps, in their marketing? The explanation is simple. It's all about mindset, or closed mindset. Whilst the walls may have been lifted from the Internet garden, they remain firmly erected inside of most operators, inside the heads of the employees.

This is not a criticism, simply an observation. And it isn't particularly insightful either. Any group, or even individual, who operates in a particular way for a prolonged period of time, and within a fixed environment, will eventually lack the critical reference points against which to validate their thinking, or to evaluate and discover alternatives. Paradigms are hard to shake once they become firmly rooted into culture.

The thinking becomes embedded in the inane corporate-speak of the organisation, which in turn affects the thinking. For a fascinating insight into this process, read Richard Mitchell's Less Than Words Can Say.

Which brings me back to the cook who can create a new language of cooking. This is the level of innovation required to take a telco into a new realm of services possibilities. And this is also why they fail to grasp fully the significance of Web 2.0, because it actually represents a new language of doing business.

Now that sounds like the fuzzy nonsense spoken by ad agencies when they talk about things being "edgy," and talk about "getting it." But, let me make it simpler. Web 2.0 is more than just technology. There's a whole bunch of people behind that technology and their reference points are quite different to more traditional industries, like telco. They too have their own "corporate speak," (often start-up speak) and various assumptions that perhaps were never written down, but just exchanged by osmosis in the numerous conferences, barcamps and coffee-shop meetings that dominate the industry.

In other words, Web 2.0 has its own culture and sub-cultures. Now, as any cultural studies expert will tell us, you can go study a culture as much as you like, even learn the language. But until you go try to live that culture, it's nearly impossible to gain insights into how it really works.

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to happen as much as it should. Most of the relationships between telco and Web 2.0 are at the "let's use some of that Web 2.0 sauce," (e.g. we'll open a twitter account) or the more mundane "show me the money," level of discussion, as if that's the only insight necessary.

Of course, no one is suggesting that telcos suddenly adopt the so-called Freemium business model, or simply give their stuff away for free regardless. That's actually not the point. My concern is that an increasing number of people are adopting Web 2.0 habits into their lifestyle simply by dedicating so much of their time and energy to web-based services, such that eventually they will be speaking this "Web 2.0 language." In cuisine terms, the danger is in spending too much time and energy in providing every innovation possible inside a fish-and-chip shop without noticing that the customers prefer to eat Indian, whether its free or not.