Verizon Furthers Plans for Open Network; Going with Google Android
[by Blake Robinson] Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android now rests within the warm embrace of Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless, further strengthening VZ’s announcement last week for an “any app, any device”
Open Network next year. In an interview with BusinessWeek, VZ CEO Lowell McAdam said, “We’re planning on using using Android… [it’s] an enabler of what we do.”
What Verizon intends to do with Android remains uncertain, but McAdam says that Verizon’s late support of the platform comes from a need to understand the details of the OS.
The Android decision, like Open Network, boils down to an issue of sustainability. Where employees at Verizon’s 25 call centers and 2,300 retail stores once spent most of their days locking customers into draconian contracts, they now spend the majority of their time helping existing customers with technical issues. Under the new model much of the technical support will be displaced to the device manufacturers and application developers. But this doesn’t mean that Verizon is now adopting a mode of caveat emptor; it plans to to fully test all devices for its network to ensure full compatibility.
From an economics perspective, Open Network will theoretically enable Verizon employees to dedicate more manpower to signing up new subscribers. It does, however, bring into question consumer’s discontent after walking into a local Verizon store looking for technical support only to be apologetically redirected to the 800 number of a third-party vendor.
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Comments (2)
Dec 4, 2007 6:31 PM
I really really doubt that VZ has done such an immediate and abrupt about-face on its historically defiant Closed Network philosophy so that they can free up retail employees to sell instead of service customers. C’mon now.
I can assure you that most customers only know that they got the phone from VZ and will be confused/angry that VZ won’t give them support. So, instead of “spending the majority of their time helping existing customers with technical issues” they would now spend most of the time explaining to customers why they can’t spend the majority of their time helping existing customers with technical issues. Have you even been to a retail VZ location to get technical support??? You get told to go the service counter to wait in the reeeeeally long line in order to speak with a “technical representative” who can help…if you want to wait forever. The Sales people don’t spend a moment of their time with you because they are already focused on “locking customers into draconian contracts”.
I’ll assume that McAdam is clueless to this because as CEO he doesn’t have to go to a VZ Retail location to suffer the pain of a mere mortal. As CEO, he is hand delivered his device by one of his minions. If he really wanted to know what goes on at a retail location he would go anonomously to his local location and ask how he can, let’s say, upgrade his Mobile Web Software. But I digress…
This all is about being proactively defensive on the Google announcment. McAdam saying that VZ “needs to understand the details of the OS” sounds alot like, “we need to know if this is a threat to us” With a vague open network announcement this gives them opportunity to 1. disuade Google from grabbing spectrum, 2. dig inside of this thing called android, and 3. depending on how everything shakes out make their open platform and hard or as easy tp participate in as they want to make it.
The carriers have never seen a true threat like Google and you can be sure they are scared to death.
McAdam says that Verizon’s late support of the platform comes from a need to understand the details of the OS
Dec 5, 2007 3:25 AM
I will say it again….
BREW, as we know it, is sooooo dead!!
That’s what happens on mobile when you go by 2 years without updating yourself.
MR