What do Microsoft, Steve Jobs and 2Degrees all have in common?

The answer is John Stanton, a founding partner of 2Degrees major shareholder Trilogy International Partners, and former confidant of Steve Jobs was recently appointed to the Microsoft board. 

Thats quite a lot to fit together, so I’ll unpack a few pieces because this is a story that should interest us all here in NZ as John is obviously an insiders ‘insider’ when it comes to all things mobile.

First of all his own CV shows a career that has grown and thrived with the mobile industry.

That is probably why Steve Job’s sought out his advice when Apple was developing the iPhone

Wired then goes on to wonder

So John is definitely a ‘go to’ guy, Jobs was legendary for seeking out the best advice from the best people and now it looks like Microsoft are after some of the same as they face the challenges of competing in the ‘post PC‘ era. 

Microsoft have been trying to get mobile right for a long time, way before Apple entered the fray, in fact second kind of ‘smart phone’ I used was a ‘Windows Mobile’ these were HTC devices that ran on Telecom’s pre XT evdo CDMA network.

They were awful and made me long for my previous Palm OS based Kyocera ‘smart phones’, but I appreciated have email on the go and other basic internet based services.

Microsoft have had numerous resets in their mobile strategy, with the latest being the purchase of Nokia’s mobile business and the desire to create one overarching OS.

It is starting to look like Apple and Microsoft have swapped places especially when IBM has now firmly lined up to support iOS in the enterprise space.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall at the Microsoft board meetings as they like everyone else try and unlock the future.

But it’d also be fascinating to hear what goes on at a 2Degrees board meeting as they try and figure out their ‘breakout’ strategy to move from the expensive and competitive ‘pre-paid’ plains to the green fields and higher ARPU of post paid business accounts, full service residential offerings and getting a slice of the media and mobile payments pies.

Those aren’t my words, they’re Simon Moutter’s as they officially relaunched Telecom’s Auckland HQ as ‘Spark City’.

Like most Kiwi’s over 35 I’ve watched the huge changes that have occurred since the 4th (Lange) Labour Government started the ball rolling by ‘corporatising’ the old Post Office.

I was a 20 something commerce student in Dunedin and it was like living through a revolution, all these moribund institutions were turned inside out overnight. In 1988 I found myself working for Telecom’s sibling NZ Post.

At that point in time, the Telecom ‘C’ suite lived in Post HQ and the tension in the air was palpable, I soon lamented to my boss that we should’ve got Telecom to leave us a copy of the billing system because after they left, Post no longer knew its customers by name.

Telecom then grew up rapidly, started dating rich boys for their money and my mates that worked there started using long words like ‘nomenclature’ but pronounced it ‘Gnomen Klature’ like their new overlords.

As I taught the NZDMA’s certificate course in Wellington over the late 80’s & early 90’s I had many bright young ‘bellheads’ pass through my classes. In truth I was a bit jealous of the glamorous world they inhabited.

When I was making a direct response TVC for the Reserve Bank in 1991 selling Rugby World Cup commemorative coins I used Telecom Mobile’s call centre as my in-bound telemarketers. When we had a scheduling issue with TVNZ I saw the power of Telecom muscles being flexed first hand.

We went on to do advertising and marketing work around the fringes of Telecom, and we had a lot of fun. I have great memories of working with Ross Baker and his mobile team  during the marketing wars with BellSouth, it was mobile that lead to our (& possibly NZs) first use of a URL in a print ad in I think 1993.

My second on-line client was ‘Netway’ and I did my first video conference with them in 1992, I was introduced to the mobile internet then as well using my ‘Mobile Business Solutions’ office in a briefcase with an analogue Motorola cell phone and a device called a cellular modem.

Over the years we drifted apart as friends and acquaintances do, I got involved in the ‘other’ side with people like CityLink, the pacific.net and ultimately TUANZ. At the Project PROBE launch in Nelson Ernie Newman called Telecom ‘nothing more than a privatised IRD’ and he lamented the fact that NZ was unique in having an essentially non productive utility as its most valuable company!

So I was in the trenches and smelly tee-shirts fighting for change over the last decade and look at where we’ve got to. We now have a rational and competitive market structure that is attracting investment and delivering dramatically better services at lower costs to most New Zealanders, we still have some issues to sort out but on balance things are vastly improved.

I have been impressed with how post-separation Telecom has taken logical steps as an RSP, they have the challenge of being both defensive and an innovator. They are focussed on success and they face some big competition from overseas, so I personally wish them well.

As Simon said tonight its time to hang up on Telecom and log in to Spark.

There’s been a wee drama unfolding off screen over the last few days as our TV operators have lined up behind SKY TV to refuse to run a TVC from Slingshot that made a reference to their ‘global mode’ service that lets customers get around IP address based geoblocking so that they can access off shore video content from providers such as Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and BBC iPlayer.

The supposed reason for the ban is the legality of global mode. Apparently a complaint has now been laid with the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) so we’ll see how this plays out, but Slingshot have now ‘censored’ the offending material so I think it may end up as an ironic net positive for them.

What is at stake here is the future direction of NZ’s close to $1bn/yr TV advertising market, what the channels sell advertisers is audiences and there are 3 things that generate big viewing audiences, live sporting events (most of which SKY own) News and compelling TV shows (like Dr Who, Top Gear, Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad). The problem is that the internet has broken all three models.

TV doesn’t break news any more, it often simply aggregates and repeats news from on-line sources, the same is happening with sport and will increase as sporting organisations will increasingly seek to monetise their own audiences and the TV content rapidly looses its audience generating appeal when global fan bases all tune in to the first run and its reviews.

I think we all know people who have gone down the global route, I have friends who have moved back to NZ from the states, they have a fast (non-UFB) 100mb/s connection, the technical savvy to ‘global mode’ and they enjoy Netflix, Hulu and US iTunes. I also know of a former cabinet minister who saw an Apple TV overseas, bought one and then was very disappointed at the NZ Apple TV offering.

I think SKY, TVNZ & Mediaworks need to be careful implying that people like these are thieves and pirates, they are not – they are customers. More than that they are prepared to pay for the content they want, just not necessarily to the so-called NZ rights holders. But this is also bigger than that, their business model is under threat from marketers shifting their budgets on-line, have you noticed the local ads you get at the start of YouTube clips?.

As advertisers follow their audiences on-line the defensive measures will get more desperate, and the real battle lines will get drawn. I think Slingshot will emerge from this skirmish with greater awareness of global mode and the concept of ‘geoblocking‘ and the whole ‘stack’ of content rights will slowly get dismantled and get dispatched to the rubbish bin of outdated ideas.

About one thing anyway, and that is that we need fibre to 98% of New Zealand. 

5.2. Universal access

Fibre for all: The Internet Party believes that fibre broadband is essential infrastructure if New Zealand is to become a global leader in the digital age. The goal is fibre to the premises of the 97.8 percent of New Zealanders covered by the UFB and RBI programmes. While UFB is expected to provide fibre to 75 percent of New Zealanders by 2020, the Internet Party will deliver fibre to the remaining 22.8 percent in the RBI coverage area.

Rather than a single, “one size fits all” national programme, this will be achieved by co-ordinating a number of individual initiatives to:

• Encourage and support Local Fibre Companies to expand their coverage areas.

• Similarly, encourage and support companies with fibre laid before the UFB programme.

• Catalyse, support, and remove obstacles for communities to self-organise, similar to BARN or other local initiatives.

• Build spurs from fibre laid by Chorus under RBI.

• Develop partnerships with iwi, marae, and local businesses.

• Invite innovative proposals from local communities and continuously look globally for successful examples.

I won’t go into the details but the key thing here is that fibre is the future. There’s is an irony that technologies are always at their best at the end of their useful lives, examples of this are everywhere, the fastest steam trains were the last steam trains, the fastest piston engined fighters were also the last ones.

The situation often occurs when their is still a degree of equivalence between the old technology and the new one that is replacing it, early diesel trains weren’t that much better and later mark Spitfires & Mustangs were up there with the early jets but everyone could see the huge potential of the new technologies.

Its the same in the copper versus fibre debate, yes better speeds can still be extracted from clean copper over short distances, but when you read about speeds like this thats an unbelievable 43tb/s – thats terabits per second. And thats why fibre is the future, nothing else can deliver that kind of potential.

I think it also helps to understand 2 other current trends, one is that 1 gb/s is well on its way to being our baseline speed and the second is why we need a planned exit from the copper network.

Everybody’s favourite mayor is thinking big, and he’s picked on 3 of my favourite topics, 5G, broadband as infrastructure and publishing every homes broadband speeds.

As London becomes the bright shining center of the European tech scene, it’s only natural that the city would like to maintain its place at the top of the pile. That’s why mayor Boris Johnson is pledging that London will roll out a 5G network across the city by 2020. It’s part of a long-term infrastructure investment plan that’ll see connectivity given equal prominence to more conventional resources like transport, energy and water. At the same time, broadband speeds for each home in the capital will be made public alongside data from the networks in order to find communication blackspots that require additional work.

While there aren’t many details, it is great to see a city that gets it, Boris also recognises that local government has a huge role to play in this space. Labour took a step in this direction last week with its policy of getting broadband added to council GIS systems but Boris is taking to a logical conclusion.

I’ll be really impressed if London has 5G by 2020 (its not really due till sometime between 2022-2024) but he’s got the decade right.

I’m keen on a 5G agenda because it means we’ll focus on having and using ubiquitous gigabit access. I hope that by the middle of the century we’ll look back at our current ‘broadband’ issues and wonder ‘what took us so long?’.