It’s been a week of events and activities, and the only common thread I can find is that they were all pretty much over-hyped. Apple’s big announcement, the one they trotted Steve Jobs out to keynote, was really nothing more than a locker service with a few tweaks. Cisco’s event was a capacity upgrade. IPv6 Day came and went with the world largely unaware, and uncaring. So is there a message here? Maybe, and in fact maybe several messages.
Part of the issue here is the need for hype, both on the part of vendors and on the part of the media. If you’re a tech rag these days (well, “virtual rag” since most aren’t in print any more) you live and die on clicks on stories that can be turned into ad impressions. Even reporters are often compensated on or at least judged on the clicks their stories get. Given that, you’d really like people to say something incredibly insightful and interesting so you can start ringing your cash register, and you reward those who do by talking about them. If you’re a vendor or carrier, you want your stuff in the public eye because that generates leads and also helps grease the skids for sales initiatives. But if you’re in the PR space you want visibility because you’re judged on it too, just like reporters are.
The problem with this gets us to our second issue. If the goal is a click, then any click will do. The old saw about news headlines like “Man Bites Dog” comes to mind. Why run that story? Because nobody would think “Dog Bites Man” was unusual and interesting. But there’s likely more substance to it, so our flight from the pedestrian message shows that substance isn’t what this is about. That tends to create superficial stories created from superficial messages, simply because superficiality when it’s well-headlined gets more clicks than truth. And that tends to lead to markets that are under-supplied with value.
Fifteen years ago, the media was the number one source for strategic insight. Today, it’s the vendors. In some ways that could be a good thing for sellers; they have the opportunity to create the buyers’ strategic vision and purchase framework. If they knew how, which is the rub. The same process that’s shallowed up the press has shallowed up the vendors.
In the June issue of Netwatcher, we’ll publish our survey of enterprise and service provider strategies, priorities, and vendor influences and the results show that in general everyone is losing a bit of influence. To understand why, we also include a section on how network operators really see content monetization in the projects and surveys we’ve done, and also what’s really happening with data center traffic as we restructure for virtualization and the cloud. According to the buyers, they’ve communicated all of this to the sellers. According to the buyers, the sellers are simply not responding, or they’re responding with a suggestion that the buyer simply surrender the whole process to the seller in the form of a fat and profitable professional services contract. And oh, by the way, nobody really knows what the objectives of the project would be, the milestones or the goal realizations. Trust us.
And if we want to talk about trust betrayed, let’s look at Net Neutrality. The FCC, as I’ve often noted, is a Federal Commission and thus effectively a lower court, and its rulings are appealed through the US judiciary. When the FCC issued its Neutrality Order, it was immediately challenged by players like MetroPCS and Verizon, but the FCC had not yet published its order in the Registry and the courts ruled the challenges were premature. Well guess what; the FCC STILL hasn’t published the orders! I don’t remember a single situation in my FCC-watching where an order this important hung fire for so long. It’s been six months since it was issued, after all. While the FCC claims it’s not stalling to avoid appeal, I frankly think that’s crap. That’s exactly what’s happening. The FCC is desperately trying to figure out a way to make its order pass statutory muster when they know darn well that’s not likely to happen with the document in its current form. So can they fix it without so much effort and change that it invalidates the vote? Are they hoping that Congress will act and moot the issue? There’s little chance that they’d do either, I think, so all of this is just political games. What a way to deal with a critical public issue!
Maybe they should just create a Neutrality URL to click on.