Copacetic

Robert Cringely suggests Google will bid in the next US spectrum auction in order to offer a completely free, add supported mobile network.

Like Gmail, Google can sell a higher-end product probably minus the ads. People might find they actually LIKE the ads if Google does its job really well and isn’t too intrusive. The ultimate result, of course, is near-total Google dominance of the mobile ad space and — this is REALLY big — transferring some significant portion of the market caps of all those mobile operators right onto Google’s hips. Thanks to consumer parsimony and telephone number portability, Google over the course of a couple years would become the dominant U.S. mobile operator. And no matter what handset or protocol those customers use, the ads will be there and Google will be raking in the dough.

Robert Cringely’s latest article Google On is more about IBM than Google. My IBM contacts tell me its burning up bandwidth all across IBM. Further to quote one insider (from an Irish perspective at least) ‘He nailed it”.

Here’s how he describes whats happening at IBM,

The heart of a company culture can be discovered if you look at the compensation system. IBM’s major incentives right now are for signing business and cutting costs. In many IT firms, IBM included, billable hours are important. This results in a system where little is done to improve service efficiency, because doing so would lead to fewer hours and less revenue. Efficiency kills, so at today’s IBM it is generally avoided.