To: Drew Williams who wrote (2686 ) 1/26/1999 6:30:00 PM From: Maurice Winn Respond to of 29987
Short of handsets: ///Our advertising campaign generated a quarter of a million leads and nearly 18,000 phone reservations - the bulk of them from just four of our gateways," he claimed. "One of our main tasks is to work down through our lists of potential customers and get them their equipment. I can tell you that the number one question coming into our global customer care center is: when can I get my phone? We are working to speed up this process."/// Message 7484573 How do they decide who gets a handset first? By date of order? By under the table bribes to Iridium management? By lottery? There must be some pretty frustrated customers. One way - yes, here it comes - that they could have ALL customers satisfied is to run a Web auction for handsets. The highest bidder gets their name on the next handset off the production line. So if somebody is leaving for Antarctica tomorrow and they just HAVE to have a handset, they could bid big bucks and get FedEx to drop it off toot sweet. Those who want one but don't want to pay $20,000 could wait a few weeks. That way everybody who wants one NOW can have it. Also, the handset makers would make BIG money so would have huge incentive to run the production lines red hot 24 hours a day and build more lines quickly. Money makes the world go round. That would ensure more subscribers get on the network sooner rather than later. The same thing applies to Globalstar who will no doubt have been using the parchment delay to get Web auctions lined up and ready to go. They will have been able to get "CURRENT PRICE PER MINUTE IS ...." designed into the handsets too to ensure they don't run out of minutes on the satellites and to encourage rapid growth of demand for minutes by pricing it cheaply when things are quiet. This is all very novel 21st century non-parchment thinking so it might be a bit arduous for ex-military types, but with a struggle, they might be able to grow to love it. Heck, even ex-communists now LOVE democracy and capitalism, they are good at it and Russia is having a ball...if they can do it... Then again, queues and rationing are very sociable and can be good fun - until the mood turns ugly or it starts raining. The military mind knows what to do to sort things out in THAT case. If it works in the army, it'll work in the markets... Maurice