Don't lie...just don't tell the truth

I'm happy to be out of the local telecomm game. One of the things that always irritated me about working in the biz locally was how strategies that would be competitive marketing tactics in any other market have devolved into a corporate game of chicken, with the players waiting to see who'll flinch first. Case in point: a local ISP expanding their network bandwidth, but deliberately neglecting to mention how much aggregate bandwidth they now have.

This ticks me off, because in the States companies can't wait to reveal their numbers. Look at Apple - they were unashamed in touting the 500,000 iPhones they sold in their first weekend. And likewise for the 2 billion songs they allowed to be purchased through the iTunes Music Store. It's a competitive advantage, not a trade secret. The power of business metrics even works conversely - anyone could easily figure out how many units of Mobile ESPN didn't sell.

When I started in marketing at IT&E in 1997, one of my first projects was to revamp the promotion of our ISP service by quantifying our network's capabilities. We'd openly tell people how many T-1s we were running. This would make the service more attractive to those people possessing the technical wherewithal to appreciate such information, and be dually attractive to neophytes who figured "Geez, I don't understand any of these numbers or acronyms...these guys must be good."

On Guam, such is always the case with the telecommunications business. Providers openly boast about how fast their networks are, how they have the most customers, or the best equipment...only to tuck tail and run like scared kids when being pegged about hard numbers. The excuse is, of course, more of fear of competitive inferiority than actually wanting to be totally honest to customers, both existing and potential. Sad.

It adds an unnecessary layer of pain to covering the local tech beat.