by Rachel Hinman
July 14, 2008
US mobile service providers are not warm and cuddly characters. They remind of my Grandma Jesse, who passed away ten years ago at the age of 94. She was a staunch woman who grew up poor in the rural Midwest and survived the Great Depression. My Grandma Jesse was a bully. I vividly remember her berating my mother to tears for paying too much for a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread. I didn’t like her very much growing up — especially compared to my other grandmother who let me drink Mountain Dew ‘til I shook. As I grew older, I understood her better and learned to see beyond her gruff and insensitive behavior. Throughout the course of her life, she experienced more tragedy than a person should bear. She had survived her circumstances yet was never able to transcend them — they haunted her and colored every relationship she had throughout her life.
Similarly, US mobile service providers are the gruff, insensitive bullies of the mobile landscape. They hide behind Balkanized billing services, Huckster-style contracts, and technical obscurity, all the while creating strained and contentious relationships with all who cross their path. Nobody really likes them, but most of us don’t have the energy or time to fight them. We just throw up our hands and say, “I’ll sign my life away for two years. Take my money. Just make my phone work.” Few realize that US mobile phone carriers, like my Grandma Jesse, were forged in a crucible of business brutality, and their gruff, insensitive behavior towards customers is an artifact of that historic legacy.
It all started with the landline telephone.
In the United States, widespread adoption of landline telephones was fueled by the products and services of The Bell System, named after Alexander Graham Bell and commonly referred to by the nickname Ma Bell. The Bell System was a trademark and service mark used by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, or AT&T. Bell had a near-monopoly on the US telephone market because it owned a piece of every part of the supply chain: from the networks for local and long-distance service to the patents on the telephones themselves.
Bell was like tribe of war mongering mercenaries when it came to their business practices; they took no prisoners with competition or customers. All competitors were forced to pay part of their revenues as a licensee fee to Bell Labs. With control of the phone system, Bell could also effectively prohibit customers from connecting phones not made or sold by Bell companies to the system without leasing fees. An oft-heard remark of the time was, “Ma Bell has you by the calls.”
Bell’s monopolization was brutal and traumatic for all players. No entity was capable of any regulatory oversight of the market, turning it into a bitter and bloody competitive battle. In 1956, the US Justice Department attempted to limited AT&T/Bell’s power over the market by limiting it’s activity to “only” 85% of the United States’ national telephone network and “certain” government contracts. Before 1956, the Bell System’s reach was truly gargantuan and the struggle to break their monopolization of the market seemed futile. Even between the years 1956 to 1984, the Bell System’s dominant reach into all forms of communications was pervasive within the United States and influential in telecommunication standardization throughout the industrialized world.
Then a 1984 anti-trust lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice brought an end to Bell’s monopoly. The case brought to light AT&T/Ma Bell’s shady and brutal business practices. The lawsuit alleged that AT&T and The Bell System were attempting to use its near monopoly in telecommunications to establish unfair advantage in related technologies, especially the fledgling computer industry. The Bell System was dismantled, but the cultural effects of their legacy have been passed down to the direct descendents of the landline phone and mobile carriers.
One would think a lot has changed since 1984 and the days of landlines, but it really hasn’t. Despite regulation and lawsuits, most US mobile service provider’s business practices reflect their brutal heritage, bullying customers, handset manufacturers, and each other. Veterans of the space are stuck in a deadlock, fighting each other in a bloody Red Ocean of feature parity and customer churn. Handset manufacturers must play the game and submit to the tyranny or risk having the distribution of their handsets choked. Customers feel it with every preposterous roaming charge or confusing billing statement. All are the artifacts of that “might makes right” struggle for money and customers.
While their history is interesting and valuable for sense-making, it’s the future fate of the mobile service providers that’s the stuff of grand speculation. What will become of the bullies? Will municipal WiFi make them obsolete? Will another technology or business model come along and blindside them out of business?
I believe the mobile carrier industry is obsolescing before our eyes. Perhaps a risky assertion, but I believe it to be true for one simple reason: tyranny in business fails because it stifles the mastery of the most important strategic strength of any modern business. Adaptability.
To quote Charles Darwin, “It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”
Nothing lasts forever, and history proves that a strategy of tyranny towards customers and monopolization in business creates tunnel vision and weakness to market forces. Carriers need to adapt their businesses practices or people will find a way around them. How does a bully change their brutish ways? How do people transcend difficult histories and realize a different life for themselves?
They become heroes.
Strong. Brave. Honorable. Compelling. Timeless. Regardless of age or culture, the mythology of the hero captures our imagination because it reflects the human qualities we prize most; the qualities we want to possess ourselves. And what better model for mobile carriers to follow than the archetype of the hero?
Imagine a world where mobile carriers developed hero-like strengths that resonated with their customers. Instead of focusing myopically on technology and near-term competition, they invested deeply in making the most painful parts of the customer experience the most joyful. Plans would be flexible and fair, bills would be easy to read, cool and innovative services would be streamlined and simple to use. Anyone could effortlessly call a friend, find a business, or share photos. Instead of trench warfare, carriers would be vibrant and adaptable.
People, companies, and industries can allow their brutal circumstances to define them or choose a different path that reflects the human characteristics we prize. My grandmother was unable to transcend the brutality of her history. Mobile carriers have the opportunity to write a new history for themselves — and what better story of transcendence to write than the story of the hero.
Rachel Hinman is a mobile design strategist for Adaptive Path. With over a decade of design industry experience, she is a strong believer in approaching mobile design and strategy from an empathic, human-centered perspective.
Published by Adaptive Path | 363 Brannan St. | San Francisco, CA 94107 | 1-415-495-8270 | http://adaptivepath.com/