*George Gilder and Peripheral Processing* See, once again, George Gilder is saying that pricing of minutes should be done by Babe rather than by a 5 Year Plan Central Pricing Committee with government approval.
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Gilder: It's a model where the network in the center has to be as
dumb as a stone. You've got a dumb network in the center and,
increasingly, the intelligence migrates outside to the desktop, to
the palmtop or whatever. This means a change in the model
that's currently emerging for Internet commerce and a lot of
Internet operations.
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GG went on to specifically mention the pdQ as the genesis of an intelligent periphery.
Leap is off to a good start with the flat rate $30 for unlimited calling which will give them a great baseload. As demand builds past 25% capacity and the peaks and troughs in demand show up, they'll be able to overlay their pricing with a demand smoothing option for daring people who are happy to look at their handset to see how much a call will cost.
This will not be suitable for most people who need a traffic jam, a regular job and fixed prices to make their lives feel snug and secure, although, counterintuitively, this actually makes their lives less secure, more difficult and expensive.
People [probably successful stock market investors who can understand peaks and troughs in demand] will be happy to use the cheap minutes on offer and avoid peak demand times. This will give them average all they can eat costs of about $10 per month compared with the flat rate suckers/customers who will pay 3 times as much for the privilege of not having to think for more than one second before making a call.
The flat raters, who are similar to flat earthers, will simply make a call anytime, anywhere. Those with bandwidth to spare will learn the diurnal cellular cycles which will be similar to tides; regular as clockwork for the most part though there will be spring tides and occasional storm surges, or even the odd tsunami. Heck, once every thousand years or so there'll be a comet impact and low lying cities will be instant myths.
GG is pretty on to it to have figured this out. Go George!
Let's hope Q! and Leap are onto it too. We don't want Lucent bringing out the pricing algorithm peak-smoothing Babes and Nokia doing the handsets with "Current Price is..." in the display with internet time displayed too. The Qcell Babes need to have those nice, rounded curves for demand with crowds clamouring to use her services at lower prices than competing base stations can achieve because of their silly sharp spikes at lunchtime, dropped calls, busy signals and frustrated customers.
The company which can figure it out will be able to outbid the C-Block competitors whose business model will assume average operations at 25% of capacity. The Babe business model will assume 50% average utilization and much, much higher revenue so more valuable spectrum.
Mqurice
200/2/2000 |
