If you build it they’ll come moments

Baseball field at night being built

Baseball field at night being built

Lowell McAdam, the CEO of Verizon, told analysts, “This is going to be one of those if-you-build-it-they’ll-come moments…” He was explaining at the JP Morgan Technology, Media and Telecom conference why Verizon plans to keep investing in microcells and attaching them to buildings.

It’s the same reason John Donovan told analysts at the Citi Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference why AT&T was boosting its network capacity. When network speeds get faster, new technologies spring up to consume that speed. According to Donovan, “5G is different because its performance is so much better that it’s going to enable a whole bunch of new-to-the-world use cases, whether it’s live maps, autonomous cars, virtual reality.” We are indeed witnessing an if-you-build-it-they’ll-come moment for telecom.

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What’s the value of a head start?

Horse crossing finish line
A head start along with 1 – 2% productivity growth becomes a sizable advantage

Early this morning, I was running on the treadmill and listening to an economics lecture by professor Timothy Taylor.

He said the year 1870 kicked off our modern era of economic growth. If you take the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of productivity, of the richest countries in the world in 1870 and compare them to the poorest countries, the ratio is 9:1.

By 1990 and the ratio widens to 45:1.

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Habit is tech

Golden hamster running in a wheel, depicting the concept of habit
Hamster Wheel” by sualk61 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

In 2010, I started a company that forever impacted how I approach product marketing. The company sold data, specifically sales prospecting lists for B2B marketing technology companies. Instead of simply delivering CSV files, our data was packaged in a web app that customers could use to interact with the data. The interface was original. Early feedback from customers indicated they were eager to use it. But, the heat was about to rise.

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