Telecom

TelZip, a small mobile-network operator, has decided to shake up the European telecommunications market by offering "free forever" broadband service to...

Before the breakup of the Bell System, U.S. telephone companies were permitted by law to ask for security deposits from a small percentage of subscribers....

Companies selling multiple products in multiple territories face the difficult question of how to allocate marketing resources. But comparing the profit...

How a market creator became a market follower.

Yes, something big did happen in the 1990s. But it was less about technology and more about new forms of competition. The keys to success now? Aggressive innovation and highly targeted investments in IT.

Singapore is well on the way to becoming the first fully networked society, in which all homes, schools, businesses, and government agencies will be interconnected...

Companies aggressively research what customers want. Yet most vendors just don't understand what customers expect of their salespeople.

AT&T, which built the U.S. communications infrastructure in the past century, could once claim to be the company "where the future was invented." But...

The U.S. Army's Opposing Force (OPFOR) is a 2,500-member brigade whose job is to help prepare soldiers for combat. Created to be the meanest, toughest...

And no one knows how to solve them.

It’s no secret that companies can use information technology as a key to competitive advantage. But the computer key can’t unlock the competitive door if information services (IS) functions—or rather malfunctions—as it does today in many companies. Top managers routinely rate their computer departments dead last among staff functions. Not only is IS slow and […]

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Back in the late 1990s Ibrahim, who was running a software and consulting company in the UK, regularly worked with big telecom companies. He began asking...

In the past three years, we at Northern Telecom Inc. have thrown away many of our internal reporting systems and radically changed our systems for tracking manufacturing, procurement, and customer service. We’ve never been afraid of change, but we don’t believe in change for its own sake either. We’ve given up many of our old […]

This is a story of how a small, young company lost a very important order, recovered, and became much stronger and more competitive by learning about market positioning. The lessons learned proved so valuable that, when all was said and done, the company concluded that losing the big order was the best thing that had […]

Some projects have such diverse requirements that they need a variety of specialists to work on them. But often the best-qualified specialists are scattered...

First-mover advantage is more than a myth but far less than a sure thing. Here’s how to tell when it’s likely to occur—and when it’s not.

Fifty years ago, when the American Telephone and Telegraph Company still held a monopoly on U.S. phone service, the first minute of a toll call could easily cost a dollar—the equivalent of about $5 today. But a few pennies of that 1950s dollar supported research and development efforts at Bell Telephone Laboratories and at AT&T’s […]

And why it's "reprehensible," for both employees and customers.

Disruptive change poses existential challenges to leadership teams, raising foundational questions about aspirations, identity, and the very soul of a...