Internet as a natural monopoly

Yes, I state that. The Internet Access Service is a natural monopoly. Similar to electricity, wired phone or subway. I could bet $100 that sooner or later it will be accepted, but at this time I will hold the money in the pocket, since the investment horizon is unclear.

Why am I right? Do you feel the pain accessing to the Internet? I do. The Internet is for porn has become a resource. Despite being split in a mesh of subnets, when we speak of the Internet access, we desire to access it all. The access is provided locally and usually there is one really good ISP in the location.

Of course, wires are not necessary. That enables competition and, actually, that enables evolution of local ISPs. Yesterday we preferred company A, today we vote for the company B. Some time ago that competition was forcing providers to propose faster and cheaper service plans, but I suppose that certain limit is reached here. E.g. an average consumer is satisfied by 2Mbps unlim and do not care for 5, 7 or 10Mbps.

Of course, faster traffic plans are desired for many tasks. But it is not a problem of limited access anymore. It is a problem of QoS. It is like I can turn 4KWt of consumer electronics in my flat or 10KWt. You see, this is not a reasonable direction for competition in electricity providing. An average person consumes certain amount of electricity. If someone desires more, he orders a dedicated line, but most of us are satisfied.

The Internet access is very similar. There is some standard value which is enough for the most of consumers. A standard could be estabilished and used in construction of domestic buildings. Some freaks will order 1Gb dedicated lines, but that will not change the overall picture.

So the competition is not really necessary in the Internet Access Service and moreover, it cause a lot of pain for consumers. There is such thing as electricity, I could just plug in my notebook in any place to charge its battery, and it is unlikely that the owner of that place will blame me in stealing his electricity. There is the Internet, but I could not plug in it at any place. ISP ask for the authentication, blaming me that otherwise I will steal its Internet traffic. So silly.

And so what? OK, The Internet is accepted as a natural monopoly and all of us have unified access in wi-fi range of the "Internet outlets". So what?

The most direct impact is on handheld devices and communicators. Local application vendors suck (cheers to Microsoft Office), cellular service providers suck (hello VoIP), botnets are on the move. Any amount of speculations could be placed here, with one main resume. Everybody is ready on these markets, so new event will cause leaders to change their places, but no revolution will emerge here. Again, this is a question of QoS, and this is not a principal issue.

The most interesting thing is Internet-enabled consumer devices. This is the most interesting topic here. As soon as the Internet Access is unified and treated similarly to the electricity access, consumer electronics has no choice but face a Revolution. This will open a kind of new dimension in the market, with intermediate stages of either creation of new simple consumer electronics to integrate with existing web-services (hello Google) or creating new web-services to support existing consumer electronics (hello Apple). And I really believe that this will be the new Bubble-Market, and the next Most-Capitalized-Hi-Tec-Company will breed somewhere in that swamp.

And the last thought. To succeed here, a company should have a good "cushion stock" of semi-product ideas, solutions, devices etc. I bet that major players will be too slow on the maneuver. Consumer device vendors will think about web-services as supplement for their real gadgets. IT-companies will treat consumer electronics as material plane of their web-services. The only and the one who will be able see the overall picture without seeng the objects double will succeed. And trust me, sometime it will have bought Google Search.

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Towards the Positioning in Ancient East

About a month ago I was on my vacation and spent several days in a city of Samarquand (Uzbekiston). There are many ancient buildings in the city, but currently I am concerned with two of them, one in front the other, and a fairy tale related to the buildings.

In XIV century, there was a great warlord Amir-Timur (AKA Tamerlan, or Timur-crop-legged). When he was going to his next war, he decided to build a new mosque (i.e. a muslim cathedral), since the old one was unable to house all believers. So he called his vizier (i.e. project manager) and ordered him to start the development while he is at the war.

Timur's wife, Hanum, was quite an active and modern woman (fro the XIV century) and said that she is bored waiting her husband from wars and asked him if he could develop her own building too. She decided to build a medrese (i.e. a muslim university). Eventually, she has got "OK" from her husband and started to build the medrese in front of the mosque, but about a half a year later.

Timur's PM has chosen quite straightforward approach to the development. They just grabbed enough slaves to populate the construction site and ordered them to work 24x7. Slaves worked for several hours, then got tired, then worked several hours more, then got more tired, then died. As soon as that had happened, more slaves was brought to replace the "retired".

Hanum was more clever at the project management. She split her slaves in two teams, one was working for 12 hours and then was replaced by another one. The overall speed og the construction was higher and the slaves were alive. Mostly.

That is, she had managed to outperform PM of her husband and after some time has passed the medrese was almost complete, while the mosque construction has a long road ahead. She was a perfect project manager (for the XIV century), but she knew nothing about the product management. In particular, she forgot about stakeholder management and positioning.

The most awful mistake was a bad positioning. That is, the entrance to the medrese was positioned higher than the entrance to the mosque, whick breaks some important muslim law. And, performing faster than PM of her husband, she forgot about who is the stakeholder.

When Timur had came back home... At first he was distressed that his PM was outperformed by his wife. Then he has noticed that the product of his wife has a bad position (see above) and got annoyed. Then he realized that there could be only one solution: to cut his PM head off and to punish his wife in not so cruel, but still unpleasand manner.

Thanks God we have such guys who do all the product management and sometimes help PMs to keep their heads on the shoulders. Even if some of them does not deserve that.

P.S. I will really appreciate if you help me to improve my English, since currently it sucks :-)