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Hey everyone, Fake Steve Jobs here. Thanks to Intercasting Corp for allowing me to post to their blog as a guest. It is part of my initiative to reach out to the mobile industry audience and do a little damage control. (I found out recently that, unbelievably, not everyone reads my blog. We are working on a fix for that, but for now this will have to do.)

Let me just be up front and say it: The mobile industry is a fucked up place to try to make a buck. Are you people masochists or what?

I know it must look like things come very easily for me, but that’s just because I am operating on a much higher plane of creativity than you. To put it simply, “I think different.” (We ended up dropping the “I” from that campaign, but it still worked.) You think stealing the UI from Xerox PARC and building the Macintosh around it and then taking credit for being a genius was easy?

Well, actually that was pretty easy, but what about the iPod? YOU try making a white MP3 player and then convincing everyone that you created the category. That was hard, man.

My point is that being the custodian of perfect consumer electronics design and setting the standard for how everyone should interact with their electronics and on top of that making everything white – I am personally responsible for a worldwide shortage of white paint – is hard work. But I endure, because the world needs me.

But this mobile thing? This is harder than anything I have ever done. My plan, as usual, was perfect: First, I had to create the most beautiful mobile device ever. That part was easy, because I am me. Then I had to go sell a whole bunch of them, so I did a deal with AT&T, which worked out fine and life was good. I fired up the hype machine and we were off to the races.

Then the shit started to hit the fan. First, some people complained about the network connection being slow, as if this was my beautiful iPhone’s fault. Can I help it if nobody told me about this G3 thing or whatever you call it? It works fine in my hermetically sealed sterile underground bomb shelter office environment, every cubic inch of which is awash with glorious wifi. Who doesn’t have wifi everywhere they go these days anyway? Hell, these naysayers are lucky I even allowed it to work on a wireless carrier at all. Anyway, that wasn’t so bad – I am used to dumb people not “getting” my genius.

But then we got sued. Twice! First it was because we were conspiring to be a monopoly with our “locked” device approach. First of all, we’ve only sold a million of these damn things, and with 250 million mobile subscribers in the U.S. alone, you tell me how having less than a quarter of one percent of the market makes me a monopolist. Maybe I have a monopoly on the cool and beautiful mobile subscribers who appreciate having their cool and beautiful iPhone, but c’mon. Secondly, how easy do I have to make it to unlock the damn thing? Are you dumbshits so lazy that you cannot employ circa 1975 hacking techniques? My weimaraner could unlock this thing. Do I have to put a goddamn iUnlock Magic Wand in the package or what?

So while I am dealing with that nonsense, I get all these financial analysts blogging about how we’re not going to sell enough iPhones and that is going to hurt our stock price. To be honest, I planned all along to drop the price eventually anyway. I just wanted to see how many people would spend twice as much as it was worth. So then I drop the price in a gesture of magnanimity so that more of the world could enjoy the perfection that is the iPhone and what I do I get? Two things: 1) A bunch of whining customers, and 2) Another lawsuit!

Here I am on the balcony saying, “Let them eat cake for the low price of $299,” and what happens? A fucking blogospheric revolt of customers who were perfectly happy with their elitist touchscreen device they were smugly using just a week before to demonstrate their consumer electronic buying power and hipness. And all of a sudden I’m the asshole? What gives? So then I offered a store credit so these bitches could buy a bluetooth headset or some other sort of white plastic accessory or whatever. That sort of shut them up, but I still had the other lawsuit to deal with. This time, I was named personally along with my company and AT&T for “price discrimination, underselling, discrimination in rebates, deceptive actions, and other wrongdoings” all because I lowered the price because I was trying to be a nice guy. “Other wrongdoings”? Can you really sue someone for that? WTF? “Yeah, so, I am suing Bob for just generally being an asshole. Gretchen in the cube next to him totally agrees, so I think we have a strong case.” Seriously. They might as well add “mischief and buggery” to their list of asinine claims. Welcome to my world.

Oh, and the daily phone calls from AT&T aren’t helping, either. Now they’re like, “Hey Jobso, pure genius of course and we’re totally committed, but so maybe this whole alleged monopolistic racketeering allegation is bad for business.” So then I have to bow to pressure again and announce a fully unlocked iPhone in France. I wonder how many days I have to wait for THAT to generate another lawsuit. What’s it gonna be this time? I can just see some dipshit alleging, among other things, “non-monopolistic normal business practices causing unfair competitive advantage,” and “other such atrocities.” And perhaps releasing an SDK so people can write applications for the damn thing will result in another lawsuit, too.

Seriously, I am starting to rue the day I said, “Man, my cell phone sucks. I think I will bring my unparalleled genius to the mobile space.” And to think I put off the iPlanet project for this. By now we could have had the entire world painted white and every sign would be in a perfectly kerned tasteful silver font. But no – I had to go and dramatically improve the telecom industry first.

Whatever. Like all of my very important work, history will judge the iPhone with fondness and respect. I just cannot believe anyone is trying to make a buck in this industry of thankless consumers. It is very unApple-like. I’ll be glad to move on after this. In the meantime, go buy an iPhone and show your support.

Available here:

http://www.ctiapartylist.com/

That’s a handy little resource. I thought you would find it useful. It doesn’t even list ALL of the parties, either. I got an invitation today that says, “Don’t forget to RSVP for the Only Exclusive VIP Mobile Partnership Reception At CTIA.” I don’t know who is hosting the party or why I was invited. (God knows I am not on any “it” lists.)

A dozen of us are getting together on Monday night for dinner because it was the only night that worked for everyone. That happens to be the same night of the mocomixer, which is a real bummer, plus the Warner Music party, and also the INmobile reception. I wouldn’t trade my Monday dinner for the world, but it got me thinking about what all the parties are for in the first place. It’s goodwill, right? I invite you to my party, you get free booze, then you talk about how awesome my party was. It’s a form of promotion.

Remember the MTV party in Orlando? That was seriously awesome. They should do that every year, and anyone else stupid enough to have a party on the same night cannot say they weren’t warned: Everyone would rather go to the MTV party. Those MTV guys are top notch.

See? I am still talking about it.

While I was writing this, the mail came. I got an envelope from Transpera. Inside is a card that says, “Who says there’s no such thing as a free ride? Avoid long taxi lines and crowded parking during CTIA. Enjoy a complimentary lift in a luxury Transpera town car.” And there is a number to call to reserve a car anytime, anywhere. I just saved like $70 on a cab ride from Oakland airport. Now THAT is impressive promotion. With all of the free booze parties, trying to stand out with yet another free booze party is not a good strategy. But this. This is real value.

Have you seen Transpera’s video solution, btw? Slick shit. Go see for yourself.

Intercasting Corp will not be hosting any parties, and we will not be paying for your cab fare. We will, however, be available. Do you want to see the new version of ANTHEM that will first be launching later this year in Europe? It is pretty cool. How about our super cool proxy messaging module or our OEM preload module? How about our localization engine that makes multiple language support a snap? Also, with full device and 3rd-party media service integration, it’s like a whole different paradigm for communication and social distribution of media and services. I realize that isn’t a very descriptive sentence now that I re-read it. Whatever. If you are interested in mobile social networking and want to see our view of it, please send me an email and we’ll get together (for free booze at someone else’s party) and I will show it to you.

I am looking at my email inbox. I have a folder into which I siphon the various trade newsletters and such. The recent subject lines:

CTIA SmartBrief - October 5, 2007 - Reports: Sprint considers new leadership
FierceWireless - | 10.05.07 | New Sprint CEO by December?
FierceWireless - | 10.04.07 | Investors lose confidence in Sprint CEO
MocoNews.net - [Oct 4, '07] CTIA MocoMixer Opens Again; MySpace-O2; Sprint Leadership

It seems Sprint’s CEO, Gary Forsee, is under fire.

Here is an excerpt from the WSJ story:
Sprint Nextel Corp. is quietly seeking a replacement for Chief Executive Gary Forsee, said people familiar with the matter, just two years after he engineered the $35 billion purchase of cellular operator Nextel Communications Inc. to keep pace with rapid consolidation in telecommunications.
The combined company has been plagued by high customer turnover, merger hiccups and unhappy investors. Sprint, now the nation’s third-largest wireless carrier by subscribers, has been lagging behind larger rivals AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC, in the race to add new customers.

They further reported that the board wants to announce a new CEO by December.

Fierce posted this story:
Sprint Nextel’s Chief Executive Gary Forsee is feeling pressure from activist investor Ralph Whitworth who told The Wall Street Journal that investors have lost confidence in the leader.

Whitworth, however, isn’t demanding Forsee step down, but places responsibility on the board. His company, Relational Investors, owns about 53.1 million shares, or 1.9 percent, of Sprint’s shares outstanding. Whitworth has experience in ousters. He played a role in the departure of Robert Nardelli, former CEO of Home Depot, and the ouster of Sovereign Bancorp CEO Jay Sidhu.

I don’t know any details about the situation, and I do not know Gary Forsee. I do, however, question the wisdom of an activist investor calling for the ouster of Forsee based on “…high customer turnover, merger hiccups and unhappy investors.” If an activist investor is going to materially affect my stock (what little of it I own) I want it to be for the right reasons.

Have you read Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt? I re-read it at least once a year as part of my reading list. Here is a free .pdf of it. This classic Harvard Business Review article was published in 1960, and its simple truths endure to this day.

Levitt opens with a challenge to management:

Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a
wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others, which
are thought of as seasoned growth industries, have actually stopped growing. In
every case the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because
the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.

He continues with a relevant example from the period:

The failure is at the top. The executives responsible for it, in the last
analysis, are those who deal with broad aims and policies. Thus:
The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight
transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because the
need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, even telephones), but because it was
not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them
because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the
transportation business. The reason they defined their industry wrong was because they
were railroad oriented instead of transportation-oriented; they were product-oriented
instead of customer-oriented.
…
What the railroads lack is not opportunity, but some of the same
managerial imaginativeness and audacity that made them great.
…
It is impossible to mention a single major industry that did not at one
time qualify for the magic appellation of “growth industry.” In each case its
assumed strength lay in the apparently unchallenged superiority of its product.
There appeared to be no effective substitute for it. It was itself a runaway
substitute for the product it so triumphantly replaced. Yet one after another
of these celebrated industries has come under a shadow.

This should give you an idea, but you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing anyway. It is fascinating to me because the lesson never seems to get learned. My favorites from recent history:
- The digital camera destroying Kodak’s film business because they did not realize it was a replacement product
- Napster cutting the record industry’s value in half because they didn’t realize they were in the music business
- Skype decimating the long distance business because the telcos thought they provided “landline” communication and not “communication”

When I look specifically at the cellular telecommunications industry today, I see barbarians at the gate. Who do the wireless network operators compete with? It isn’t other network operators unless you think it is worth fighting over the shrinking available market of people who do not yet have a mobile phone. No, Levitt would argue that network operators facilitate communication. Then you have to define communication. It used to be “voice.” That was when it was easy to be the CEO of a telco. In a digital world, you have to add “data” communication. What is “data?” It is everything. Voice is data, and that’s why the VoIP companies are kicking ass. But so is music, video, messaging, location, etc. Google, and who knows who else, is going to bid on 700Mhz spectrum. Did they seem an unlikely competitor a few years ago? In the meantime, competing wireless technologies, including WiMAX, are threatening the very investment upon which the existing cellular industry was built.

Communication is increasingly non-voice, too, as a new generation of teenagers (who will grow up to be adult business people themselves) have stopped using email altogether, are about to stop using instant messaging, and prefer to communicate via their favored social networking site. That’s right – any social networking site, if properly focused, has a chance of disintermediating the network operators when a critical mass of users stop using their phone’s PIM to originate communication and instead go straight to a social networking site (maybe via WAP?) and initiate their communication from that friend list. Today a network operator may think they are making decent data revenue on those SMS and page views, but they could be precipitating their own demise for a few million dollars if that same user finds a lower-cost alternative to access that server-based friend lst. A very strategic approach is required to give consumers what they want while doing so without shooting yourself in the foot. (Or worse, in the head.)

Anytime you want to rile someone who works at a network operator, talk to them about the inevitability of becoming a dumb pipe. “I just don’t see where you are adding any value other than QOS, and every carrier drops as many calls as the next,” you might say. “I’d rather have a wifi phone with a VoIP client on it and do all my business from Starbucks than pay a carrier $80 a month,” you might add, as you observe that you are indeed meeting said carrier employee over a triple grande latte. I have a lot of friends at carriers, and they don’t even get offended by this conversation anymore - they already know it and are trying to make sure they don’t help sink the ship. Every one of them hopes that their CEO isn’t “a fucking idiot bell head who can’t learn new tricks.” (That is a direct quote from one such friend of mine, whose name, I hope you’ll understand, will remain undivulged.)

Technology is game-changing. It isn’t clear to everyone what competitive pressures a telco faces today, but from where I am observing, it is apparently clear to Gary Forsee, who has made two critically important bold moves:
1) Content and distribution need each other, and to protect margins, you take inventory off the market. Further, to ensure a competitive stance in a consolidating market, you take inventory off the market. He did this by merging Sprint and Nextel. This established a sizable customer base that can later be converted to the new game.
2) He established a sizable market lead in WiMAX that will leave competitors a year behind. The price advantage of WiMAX has been estimated at as much as 1000x less than competing 3G technologies. Opinions vary, I realize, but CEOs are supposed to make bold moves, and this is what I am observing.

From his actions, I see a guy who recognizes that there is no reason for an incumbent industry to give its future away to a smaller and nimbler (and worse, unforeseen) competitor.

The traditional telecom industry is threatened by so many other challengers that it reminds me of the railroad example in Levitt’s article. The challengers to the railroads such as “cars, trucks, airplanes, even telephones,” bear a striking resemblance to the telco challengers such as “cable companies, the internet, WiMAX, and even social networking sites.”

I am willing to sacrifice some short-term growth if it means there is at least a future to be secured. Measuring the success of these long-term strategies by their short-term returns is not wise in my opinion. But maybe that is the problem; Maybe the “unhappy investors” do not see that the future is threatened and are simply comparing Sprint to other telcos. I suppose you don’t get credit for making an investment until it pays off.

The only CEO I would want at the helm of any telco, wireless or otherwise, is one who is thinking differently about the future and showing vision beyond reducing subscriber churn. Has Forsee not demonstrated a vision for the future beyond Sprint’s current business? He has to me, and as a Sprint investor, that is what I want to see.

UPDATE MONDAY 10/8/07: Gary Forsee resigned today, as some had expected. I maintain that Forsee’s key initiatives while at the helm were not just opportunistic but necessary moves to position Sprint well for the future.