I think we're drifting off Daniel Scuka's original point,
which is a good one, even if I'm not sure I agree with it.
His Wireless Watch column this week suggested that
Vodafone might do well in a market that it handles
well elsewhere, one that other current Japanese
providers are hardly handling at all. And that's not
"selling to suits". Or at least, it's simplistic to
sum it up that way.
Quoting:
"Consider how Vodafone has treated its corporate
customers in the UK and Europe: it's very similar to
how a telecom provider would deal with a large
corporate client's data requirements or its nationwide
PSTN requirements.
"They assign a single account manager to that
company, and implement some sort of fleet
management program for the mobile hardware
and software, resulting in standardization, regular
maintenance, predictable performance, and tight
integration with the client's back-end systems
(creating yet more opportunity for the savvy
mobile vendor to sell software and services).
The Japanese carriers just can't do this."
OK, now that might be a debatable point, but it's not
selling J-Phone phones and personal service plans to
greying-male Japan, it's selling integrated systems to
corporations. A very different thing.
What's the prospect here? At first blush, it seems
wide open.
In my brief spells inside Japanese corporations, what
I've seen is that some don't even have much regular
voice landline penetration. Imagine one phone per
dozen deskworkers. Some companies have one
e-mail drop for a whole section.
This looks good, in a way, virgin territory, but is exploiting
it really only a question of expertise? I doubt it.
Daniel concludes:
"...... Japanese carriers are facing marginal subscriber
effects -- they've already signed up over half the nation's
population! The future is "ED" -- enterprise data, and the
Japanese carriers just don't seem to get it."
I'm not a wireless pundit, I only impersonate one on
keitai-l, but ... I think it's not enough for carriers to "get it" --
business customers have to "get it", too.
But even that's not enough. They also have to have the
breathing room for the IT investments, and strategies
that make sense, and furthermore (and here's my point
for the rest of the posting) strategies that the corporate
social environment permits..
Yes, this kind of innovation happens in Japan, but it tends
to be strongest in areas of real corporate growth, areas
where there is a basic underlying mobility of personnel,
areas where competition is rife.
The convenience store chains have been remarkable
technology leaders here. (7-11 Japan actually bought
out 7-11 US, the original chain, some years ago, and
turned it around.) But they can do this in large part
because they really don't have much traditional payroll.
Convenience-store franchisees are in a real sink-or-swim
situation. The chain can introduce innovations almost at
will. Compare. most of the rest of Japan, where employees
can languish in the corporate hothouse almost indefinitely.
Or in the millions of aging shops that line the avenues, living
on time borrowed for them (at low rates of interest) by
their local LDP party flacks.
If, as some claim, corporate IT strategy is often
part of an arms-race-like game, it might make sense
to look at engrained attitudes about arms,
and see if this says something about acceptance
of technology in similar game situations.
Japan rejected the gun, and this is cited as a
remarkable and singular instance of "technology
moving backward."
But Japan never lost the ability to make guns.
Gunsmithing just fell under an elite-consensus
arms-control regime. There is the story of an
early meiji-era gaijin visitor who loaned out his
gun to a craftsman, only to have it returned, with
a finely-wrought and perfectly functioning copy,
only a few days later. The Japanese were, at
one point, making the best cannons in the world;
they could suppress the deployment, but not the
knowledge.
So is it really knowledge that's the gap?
I don't think so. Japan's approach to computers
has been, for a long time, "let's see how much
money we can make on this stuff in world
markets before we start doing dangerous
experiments with them on our own social
system." How different from, say, the
American attitude of "how soon can we
make this revolutionize everything?"
Japan as a white-collar corporate welfare
state bears some resemblance to late-feudal
arrangements. Dampen the fires of competition,
employ (as the banks do) a "convoy system",
and efficiency will take a distant backseat
to the bureaucratic imperative: the more
desks, the merrier. It's hard to find a
better example of this than the banks,
which, despite their supposed ills, actually
increased payroll through the 90s.
IT introduces turbulence in these peaceful
arrangements. New IT initiatives make great
and risky demands on a company's best people
if they are to be successful. -- the loss of their
time represents opportunity cost that has to
be balanced, in some long run, against the
benefits of the new technology.
So being in the IT vanguard virtually requires being
in a corporate vanguard. And where will
this be found? New subsidiaries spun off by
Japanese corporations might seem to be a
fertile field for operators like Vodafone --
until they do a human-resource survey of
these clients, and find that many of these
kogaisha are full of "corporate boat-people",
the rejects, waiting for the fateful day when the
parent-company stake drops below 50%.
And the motherships will be full of the better-
connected, those who are too careful to make
threatening moves on each other, inter- or
intra-corporately.
Opportunities exist, I'm sure, but will
they abound? Vodafone's chances in this
market may well rest with taking a humble
and slow approach. They may have no
choice. Where DoCoMo ranks, according
to a recent Economist article, in the
upper ranks of net wealth creators,
Vodafone ranks among the highest net
wealth destroyers. Being forced to make
do with less capital and initial credibility,
in a corporate culture that's averse to
(but slowly forced into) buying what they
have to sell, should teach them lessons
they can take anywhere in the currently-
heavily-strafed telecom industry.
But that's an old story isn't it? "We
cracked the Japanese market!" The
barriers might be more economic now,
but they are still structural as well.
Or, hey, maybe I'm wrong. Remember, this is only
an *impersonation* of wireless punditry. ;-)
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "M. David" <davidm1@hotmail.com>
To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 8:35 AM
Subject: (keitai-l) Re: J-phone - from youths to suits?
>
> If you market to youth (youths?), as coca-cola and nike does, older people
> purchase the products because they "feel" young, or want to connect with
> the image/lifestyle of youth.
>
> I dont think it will be feasabe for J-Phone to maintain a youth market if
> they do try to reposition the JPhone brand as an Oyaji's phone. It'll make
> em loose any ground they've gained with the shamail phones.
>
> David M.
>
>
> >
> >
> >OK, so I guess the consensus is J-Phone/Bodafonu does have a bit more
than
> a
> >snowball's chance in hell to be Oya-ji's friend too. But I'm not sure I
> buy
> >the NIKE analogy (sneakers as a corporate purchase? Remember, J-Phone
also
> >needs the SI expertise to integrate the sneakers with the grey suit and
> the
> >colourless tie... ;-))
>
>
>
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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Received on Tue Feb 5 15:35:11 2002