To me, a lot of IRIDF's marketing plan and product roll-out is/was a mystery; I only hope G* learns from its mistakes and isn't too badly beat up in the markets in the meantime. (I think it needs to raise another 0.5 B$ or so)
I never thought IRIDF's target market, at least initially, would/should be individuals. It has a product that should be attractive at present prices mainly to large organisations, which buy on the basis of individual, customized marketing, and only after a lot of study, demos, etc. Why then blow 100+M $ on magazine ads, and, having done so, then drop the ball on info requests?
But, for G* s/h there are some encouraging discriminators between I+ and G*, even forgetting the endless debates about the relative virtues of CDMA vs TDMA, bent pipe vs X-link, etc:
1. G*'s regional service providers are top drawer. G*'s plan from the beginnning was to work with existing, local telco's. My impression of Iridium's plan is that it tried to bypass them (and spent a lot of money on the space side to have this capability); in the end, Iridium, like Globalstar, relies on local SP's, but they don't match up very well with G*s, and it's not clear the financial incentive Ir offers it's SPs match those offered by G*
2. G*'s region by region phased roll-out seems a lot more rational than the highly publicised world-wide switch on Ir attempted (unsuccessfully.) G* should be able to market quite successfully as a "regional" phone in many 3rd world areas, without having to promise immediate world-wide roaming capabiliy. After 3-6 months of operation on that basis, it would be ready for the "prime time" marketing challenges of US and European business travellors.
3. G*'s design will allow pretty comprehensive testing for months before the last satellite is launched; so I expect fewer bugs at the time of service start
4. G* has three phone providers vs two, and the user terminal production pipeline seems to be more robustly filled than Iridium's was this far ahead of service start.
But having said all that, it's undeniable that bad news for Ir is bad news for G* and Lor for a long time.
RS |
