Telco Fail Special. Etisalat WINS Challenge.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I know quite a bit about telcos. Back in 1991, strangely enough as allied forces started the air and ground assault to liberate Kuwait (great timing, I know), I launched a magazine called Communications Middle East Africa, or Comms MEA as it became known. Then, in the late 90s, I was involved in the communications strategy, planning and rollout of privatised Egyptian mobile operator Mobinil. I subsequently worked with France Telecom, Jordan Telecom, Jordan's Mobilecom, Fastlink, Zain, Wataniya in Kuwait, Algeria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Batelco, Nawras, MTN (in its Saudi license bid) and others in the Middle East and further afield. I've worked on communications strategy, marketing campaigns and capacity building programmes in telecommunications and ICT for regulators, telcos, manufacturers and governments.

I've got telco form, in short.

I knows me telcos.

So it is with considerable confidence I can assert that never in my life have I ever encountered a telco as woefully useless as the UK's EE. We're not talking just averagely bad, we're talking organisationally dysfunctional to an extraordinary degree. We're talking spectacularly bad in a sort of massive display of really bad fireworks of badness bad. I wonder they remain a viable business, so awed am I by the symphonic virtuosity of their badness.

It's truly incredible, a Harvard Business School case study in how an organisation can remain profitable whilst exhibiting a stellar disregard for its customers. If you're in the customer service business, give up. Go home. You're wasting your time. That EE is still trading demonstrates for all time that the customer really doesn't matter.

I'm not going to bore you with the whole story. But you'll get an idea of how awfully bad they are when I tell you that I finally gave up and walked into one of their stores to get help fixing my issues with their awful service, blitheringly incompetent UX and heart-attack inducing IVR-driven call centre.

"I know," said the chap in the shop. "We're really, really bad. And there's nothing I can do about it, they don't trust us to get access to anything here in the shops, you'll have to talk to the call centre. It's frustrating, I know, but there's nothing I can do for you."

"But there's no way you can ever speak to a human at the call centre. You're just stuck in the system and when you eventually find your way to the option to talk to a representative it hangs up in your face."

"Yup. I know. Everyone hates us."

It's an interesting customer service technique. My frustration and anger were instantly defused. If it's so bad their own people have given up, what chance do I have? I eventually managed to find a way around my issue, albeit an inelegant one, but then found their iPhone app crashing every time you tried to invoke it. Reboot mobile, no change. I went to another EE store.

The bloke in the store grimaced. "Yes our app does crash. It does it on my iPhone, too. Look, I'll show you. There. Crashes every time.  Bad, isn't it?"

"But a telco in the smartphone era whose app crashes on the world's most iconic smartphone platform is surely on a one way ticket? It's almost unbelievably incompetent."

"I know. But what can we do? We just work in a shop."

In fact, EE's service is so bad, it got fined £1 million by UK regulator OFCOM. Googling 'EE customer service' gets you access to a very deep bucket of ordure indeed. It's the UK's most complained about mobile operator, as it turns out. And that seems to be quite an achievement in itself given the tone of debate around the other operators.

Which is why, coming back to the UAE from leave, I found myself looking at Gerard Butler gurning at me from a green-tinged billboard and thought, almost fondly, 'You know what? It might still be running the dumbest, most ill-advised campaign in the history of telco promotion, but Etisalat isn't all that bad.'

Yup, you heard it here first. Challenge accepted. Etisalat vs EE? I'll take the home team any day...

Mobile Money, Apple Pay And Disintermediation

Dead. Yeah. Dead.

Funny, I started yesterday with a post about mobiles and ended it talking about disintermediation. Hence a new post.

Disintermediation is what the Internet does to people who are selling privileged access to things. The Internet destroys privileged access. So, for instance, if you are in PR and selling media relations, I can use online tools to access journalists and I don't need you. If you're an ad agency selling creativity (it can be crowdsourced) or media booking (click, click hellooo), I can DIY, thanks. If you're a journalist selling me access to events (all my pals are filming it and sharing the videos on Twitter, thanks). Or a travel agent selling me airline tickets (click), a bookshop (click) or any other number of people taking my money for giving me something I can do using the Internet, you're dead meat. Perhaps not today or not tomorrow, but soon enough.

I was talking about it in the last of the Bookshop DIFC writing, editing and publishing workshops (thanks, chaps, I had a lot of fun and nobody's sued, so that's good) last night. I was trotting out my old catechisms - "Quality is irrelevant when technology improves access" and "The Internet destroys privileged access" - in relation to the ongoing destruction/transformation of the booky book publishing business.

The mobile's done the same, of course. I remember with painful clarity being at a Motorola PR klatch in Vienna in the mid '90s as we discussed maintaining the relevance of radio paging in the SMS era. The answer, of course, was flee for the hills. The invitation to fight to the last man in an epic stand against overwhelming odds with no possible gain in sight is one I will always respectfully decline.

Guess I'm not made of the stuff of heroes.

The mobile hasn't just done for the radio pager - it's done for the bedside clock, too. It's killing the iPod, iterative technological destruction at its best. The digital camera's not looking too pleased, the dictaphone is a relic and taxi companies aren't far behind. Telcos are being reduced to faceless providers of wholesale bandwidth - and they don't like it.

Who'd have thought you could do so much with a telephone, eh?

Apple Pay is the new toy from The Church Of Jobs. It's an NFC based payment system based on your Apple Store subscription that lets you pay for things by waggling your mobile at a terminal. It's causing some issues in the States right now where a group of retailers, including Wal-Mart and Gap, are prevented from accepting it because they've signed up to a rival NFC payment scheme that's not got off the ground yet. They're going to have to rip up that MoU fast if they're not going to alienate millions of iPhone-toting punters wanting to waggle their cash across.

And so the mobile is going to do for credit cards. We're not going to need that wee piece of plastic anymore. Which is interesting, because we arguably don't need what's behind it. We're paying 2.5% of every single transaction for the privilege of moving our money from our account to credit someone else. Sure, the retailer pays the 2.5%, not us. But if you think they're gladly absorbing that cost rather than passing it on faster than you can say antidisestablishmentarianism, you've got another thing coming.

Apple, Amazon et al can move money for nothing. And we trust them - we've already given them our credit cards. What if they tell us we can have what we want without having to use the card? Pay the 2.5%?

Banks will never allow it, surely?

Yeah, but wait until they realise they don't own the customer anymore. They're just virtual money stores at the backend of our more important direct relationship with the retailer. By inserting itself in the transaction, the mobile displaces the payment facilitator and renders it faceless. It's just a redundant transactional layer and technology removes redundant transactional layers rather neatly.

There's not a thing they can do about it. It's already game over.

A Question Of Mobiles

It's a long story of no interest to anyone but myself, but hell, this is my blog and if I want to be a boring old git, nobody can stop me. Bwaa haa haa etc.

I bought my first mobile - in 1994 - under enormous pressure. I hated the idea of carrying a phone around with me and loathed the sort of people you saw hefting the things around - all blue suits, white socks and green ties. Dom Jolie and so on. But then I started publishing a weekly and needed to be available in case anything happened at the printing press.

I got an Etisalat 'HudHud' - a rebadged Nokia - and the extra life battery pack. I'd been covering telecoms in the Middle East since the days of the car-phone, so the HudHud was quite impressive. It was a portable rather than a luggable, but the extra battery pack was the size of Luxembourg. Apparently a HudHud is a desert bird. Who knew?

A succession of Nokias followed. The houbara bustard sized HudHud got smaller over the years - as did the outrageous phone bills. Going from writing telecoms magazines to handling the communications strategies for telcos, I soon had a pocket full of SIMs and a deep-rooted sense that telcos simply didn't understand data. 

Telecomms people used to look down their noses at datacomms people. The telephone was mightier than the modem. I'm serious. And it started to become clear that the world's dominant handset maker had the same legacy attitude. The Nokia 6310 - I would still argue the company's brightest moment - remained resolutely mono, mini-screened and app-free. It never transitioned to a new generation, Nokia failing to understand technology adoption models and so lurching from inflection point to inflection point rather than offering users a smooth transition through iterations of an evolving platform. In technology, discontinuity invites disloyalty - users have an incentive to switch platforms if their investment in your new new thing compared to their investment in your old new thing is the same as the investment required to adopt your competitor's new new thing.

It's a thing thing. Trust me.

And the 6310 was where I got off. I clung on for ages, but nothing happened. No new model, no colour screen, no data evolution. No clear upgrade path. Time to get a Sony Ericsson, then.

What do you get when you mate an oyster and a brick? The Nokia Communicator. This was the 'future of the smartphone' and I wasn't buying. But then the Sony Ericsson experience was awful, too. Back to Nokia, which by now had colour screen 'smart' phones such as the N86 and N93. But the store (to become the ill-fated 'Ovi store') had nothing in it. No backgrounds, ringtones, apps. Nokia invented the smartphone and invented the ecosystem. It's just they didn't 'get' that an ecosystem needs to be populated, otherwise it's just barren terrain. They were a phone company playing at computers.

Boy Jobs, of course, coming at this from a computer perspective (one of those dirty 'datacomms' people, don't you know? Absolute parvenu, dahling) got it in spades. Nokia was still laughing as the water in the bath warmed up and his scalpel sliced through their sleepy carotid.

Which left me with a dumb smartphone. I stomped off and went for Google's Android. If I'm honest, I was probably a little bit angry with Jobs for killing 'my' mobile but more angry with Nokia for not understanding (them and the telcos, too) what he understood - that a mobile is a computer, not a phone. An access point to an ecosystem full of super toys and fun things. The terminal device in a rich data-driven world of high bandwidth always-on gloriousness.

It was after I'd flung my incessantly-crashing HTC at a wall that Nokia got in touch and slipped a canary-yellow Lumia my way. I loved the handset - still do. I don't like Microsoft, never really have. I hated them as a journalist (I still treasure 'official' letters of complaint from them) and never really learned to love them as their Middle East PR guy (I was, for something like five years). I tried, Lord knows I tried. But behind Barney lies an arrogant, mean, machine.

I wanted Nokia to win, to come back and show us it had worked things out and understood what was happening. I wanted there to be a third way, an alternative to Google's Moonie-evangelistic ubiquitousness or The Church of Jobs.

It's no use. It's game over. Microsoft has deleted Nokia and it's now clear that any innovation in mobile applications isn't going to be starting with Windows. Developers can't be bothered to port their apps to WinPhone and every other kid in the playground has shinier toys than me.

Now I'm in a real pickle. I can't make my mind up and it's been killing me for weeks.

Android or Apple?

ArabNet - The Dubai Digital Summit

It starts tomorrow - ArabNet's Dubai Digital Summit - three days of conference, workshop, developer competition, roundtable and other information sharing stuff. It's a pretty packed agenda - there are over 120 speakers (including li'l ole me) and there are expected to be upwards of 800 attendees gathering at the aesthetically interesting Atlantis Hotel on the Palm.

The three-day conference is at the core of a number of other activities, including ArabNet's 'Digital Showcase'. This excellent initiative gathers over thirty young digital companies from around the region and provides them with a platform to show their wares at ArabNet - and includes brokered meetings with media buyers, banks, telcos and other business enablers. There's also the final of ArabNet's developer competition which will bring together winners from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Jordan in a final face-off to crown the best developer in the Middle East. My money's on the Jordanians...

The actual conference consists of three tracks - a Forum Track and a Workshop Track - then on day one a Startup Track and day two an Industry Track, which splits into verticals and is more 'solutions' oriented and day three a Roundtable Track. Someone with a highly advanced sense of humour has put me moderating the banking panel on the industry day, which should provide a few laughs if nothing else...

There are four industry round tables taking place in the Roundtable Track, which will tackle key issues in the development and expansion of the Middle East's digital industry. I'm chairing the one on advertising, "Growing digital adspend", which should be interesting as the invited attendees for what is intended to be a productive brainstorming session represent all sorts of interests - mainly vested! - in the way this important sector is developing in the region.

As anyone who's been to ArabNet in Beirut will attest, there's a 'vibe' to the event that is truly infectious, a coming together of smart people who share a passion for something that is at the heart of exhilarating and often breakneck change and transformation. There's a grin-inducing cocktail of dynamism and innovation in the air.

So all in all it promises to be a busy, intense and fascinating week - and if you are interested in mobile, online, digital, social or anything touching the online and digital industry in the Middle East, you would be mad not to be there*.

Oh, and you can catch my presentation on addressing the 'content crisis' at 5pm on Wednesday and see quite how neatly I manage to wave in the inevitable plug for Beirut - An Explosive Thriller.

* Disclosure - Spot On is the PR partner for ArabNet but as you'll all know by now, this blog has never represented my day job. I'm bigging up ArabNet because I'm a fan, not because I'm shilling for them.

Technology, Dubai and the Nokia Lumia 920

Nokia 638 (19,06cm de alto), Nokia 2160 EFR (16,42 cm), Nokia 5160 (14,84 cm), Nokia 6070 (10,5 cm) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's been a funny week for technology in general. The Great Phone Meltdown led to Nokia Middle East lending me a Lumia 920 and The Great PC Meltdown resulted in me taking to my iPad while I tried to sort out my notebook. And even tried to sort out what I use a notebook for!

The result has been, for me at least, fascinating. I've moved a lot more of what I do to 'the cloud' but find the single tasking nature of the iPad precludes much of what I want to use a system for - sure, it's great for doing email and consuming content, but it's not great for producing content. And in my day job as well as my hobbies, I'm a relatively constant producer of content.

But the iPad is now my 'out and about' device of choice. The notebook, ironically, stays rooted to the desk. It's stopped tottering around before hurling itself at walls but after this week's performance, it's definitely EOL.

The great surprise for me out of all this technofailure has been the Remarkable Triumph Of Lumia. They say brands ascend when low expectation is met by high performance and that great truth means Nokia better slow things down before it gives itself the bends. The Lumia is a stunner.

Let's start with the basics. As I mentioned before, it's solid - some would say weighty. As time has gone on I have come to find that weight reassuring. Seriously. It's built out of polycarbonate, which means scratches don't show. There's no user access, no back cover to prise off to get at the battery and SIM, instead the SIM is inserted in a sprung carrier at the top of the handset (it's a MicroSIM holder, so I had to get my Vintge Mubashir chip SIMcumcised at local phone shop. A clip and a wince and dirty deed done.

The screen is raised out of the unit's body and seemed to be significantly more fingerprint resistant than the HTC and, it has to be said, the iPad. The display is clear, bright and the resolution is stunning - retina display eat yer heart out. The back of the handset has a Carl Zeiss lens (WooOOOoo), a flash unit and a black strip that looks decorative but is actually the location of the inductive charging coil. The base has two speakers and a conventional charging socket. That's it, minimalist and sleek.

But you'd expect Nokia to make a great handset, wouldn't you? Until I gave up on them (about 6 months after the Symbian Blog posted a last, despairing post saying 'We give up') and flung my N86 at the wall, I'd been a Nokia punter for nigh on two decades. My first Nokia was an Etisalat 'HudHud', a grey/green brick with a pingy antenna. My favourite Nokia ever was the 6800. Seriously. When they didn't upgrade that to colour and 3G, I fled to Sony Ericsson only to flee back to the N series a few frustrating months later. But then, post 2007, I started to hear about people doing things with their handsets I couldn't. By about 2009 it was starting to get embarrassing. Great build quality doesnt make a dumb smartphone any smarter.

But now there's something new behind the screen - Windows Phone 8. I can't begin to tell you how set up I was to loathe this. Microsoft has always sucked at mobile - from Windows CE right through to those awful handsets OEMmed from HTC by that Scottish bloke who went bust, Microsoft just hasn't managed to compete on mobile. Ballmer's laughter at the iPhone rings hollow down the years - he was laughing at the halo product in a segment where Microsoft had not only always sucked, but had ignored until dangerously late. Today MS and Nokia have much in common beyond their partnership. They're both comeback kids. And I have long stopped considerinng Windows a 'cool' product - Vista killed off the final vestiges of respect I had for the interface (and in case you're interested, I have used every iteration of Windows ever built. Windows 1.0 was pretty gnarly, I can tell you!). After the plane crash of Vista, Windows 7 was usable - that's all I cared about by then.

They shouldn't have called it Windows at all, IMHO. It has nothing in common with the WIMPs interface on your desktop. Those squares of colour quickly worm their way into your sensibility, the interface is highly intuitive, fast as hell and an absolute joy to use. You almost forget it's there, which is the highest praise I can think of for technology. The screen is very bright indeed, bright enough to withstand the UAE's sunlight - no more hunching over the screen to try and read it in your own shadow. Taps do what they're supposed to do, menus flip into place with a flash and everything's pretty much where you'd expect to find it. I was shocked at how quickly I found myself navigating around with ease and, yes, enjoyment.

Nokia's mapping software is cool and works, Nokia Drive in particular gives you  fully functional and capable GPS (I had occasion to use it yesterday and I can tell you it truly did save the day), including voice guidance. The augmented reality city app turns curious onlookers into gurgling idiots and the information layer works in Ajman. If you know what I mean. The camera is simply superb, particularly in low light conditions. There are loads of nice little touches going on - haptic feedback gives you a little 'bump' sensation when you use the three 'big' navigation controls ('back', 'home' and 'search'), you can save profiles to your Google contacts (not just Hotmail) and Gmail integration is a dream.

I tried a couple of games out, slick, fast and colourful. Pretty much what you'd expect. There's a lot more on the app store and I haven't really had time for a 'play' yet.

Rowi was the first Twitter client I tried out and I instantly loved it. There's no TweetDeck yet, the WP8 'ecosystem' is yet young - and no Instagram, although that has now become irrelevant to me as I typically load photos to Tweet rather than share on Instagram.

The million dollar question, then. Am I a 'win back'? One of those millions of customers Nokia is looking to woo away from the iPhone and, crucially, Android? I'm going to play with a Galaxy S3 at the weekend to make sure it's 'Apples to apples', but I'm broadly headed Lumiawards. It's a truly smashing mobile and no wonder it's selling, according to Jacky's COO Ashish Panjabi, like hot cakes.