BT has got NO friends!

Over the last few weeks it seems that the current Ofcom review of BT is unlikely to follow the pattern of "business as usual" when it comes to outcomes.  These could mean that the chickens finally come home to roost at BT.

Over the course of a week BBC Radio4 featured the failures of Broadband Britain to live up to promises on the Today programme.  It was not until 4 negative features that BT CEO Gavin Patterson finally agreed to an interview and that was not face to face rather it was prerecorded and broadcast on a Saturday morning.  You have to ask just what the PR team were doing, was it a failure or arrogance?

This weekend Chris Bryant wrote to The Telegraph calling for the break-up of BT because it had failed to provide the Broadband needed of UK PLC despite £1.8bn of grants to do so.  This is a shadow minister prepared to outline Labour Party policy in the middle of a Leadership election!

These events on there own might lead you to think that BT will be alright, it might find itself facing tighter regulation but it's unlikely that a break-up will be forced on it.  However take a look at the fact that industry rivals that are also calling for a split are also donors to the Conservative Party and you might start to thing that BT could be facing years of legal challenges and disruption.  Given that Ian Livingston's time in Government was shorter than a contract for one of BT's services you have to ask what friends they have?

The decline and fall of HTC

Over the last week a number of people have been speculating on the future of HTC saying that it is at risk of disappearing.  The problem is that having climbed the mountain of volume sales of phones to number three it has failed to ascend to the top and rather has slipped back as a result of poor sales for the flagship HTC One (M9).

The problem for HTC is that the "upgrade" to the M9 was judged by most not to be significant enough from the M8 and so growth stopped.

The creation of the mobile phone mass market was achieved by a few manufacturers who offered a range of handsets.  The manufacturers of my early days in mobile are now consigned to museums rather than still major players, Motorola, Erricson and Nokia.  But then others older than me will say the same about car manufacturers of the early 20th century and we still have cars.

The global dominance of Nokia was achieved not on a single handset but rather on a platform of devices that were conceived thanks to long term analysis and developed not just internally but also using the skills of the IDEO Group.  This meant that both hardware and software evolved dependent on the markets that the handsets were sold in to.

The Android Ecosystem leaves very little room for customisation by manufacturers and contract manufacture means that common components leave devices looking very similar.

The shame is that the early days of HTC saw it make a range of handsets that made use of touch AND keyboard. Why then now are we faced with a single form factor in just two sizes? Perhaps we can expect contract manufacturing will give HTC some space to recover rather than it fail but it is more likely that it will pass into history.