The New York Times reports that Comcast has, without great fanfare, become the biggest provider of broadband Internet services, with "profit margins that would be the envy of any business". That is great news, for several reasons.
First, for a while now, since the demise of Excite@Home and Covad, I have been somewhat worried whether broadband was profitable at current prices. It certainly seemed to me that it should be, especially for the cable companies (where it is sort of like McDonald's adding breakfast--new services that leverages existing infrastructure, requiring very little incremental cost, after a few expensive years of defining the business). But, like I said, everyone seemed to be losing money and going out of business, and then smart pundits, like PBS Cringely, were speculating that "broadband [as we know it] is dead".
Reading the article, it sounds like they have taken the "Google approach": rather than trying to create some sort of complicated bundle or deliver "value-added" content, they have focused on the fundamentals of their value proposition: an affordable, reliable, easily purchasable, always-on fat pipe of data. Unfortunately, read further and it sounds like this has been mostly dumb luck: it appears those in charge have every intention of screwing up (there is even the obligatory "have to be better than Yahoo" comment).
But, if they absolutely, postively, feel they must go beyond the basics, I do have a feature suggestion: bundle registration and hosting of personalized domains. I finally got around to getting my own, and though it wasn't too hard, it was definitely too intimidating for even the above-average user. I was also shocked at how cheap it was. And in the bargain, by providing user's with the option of personal domains, they can implement a variation on Joel's textbook example of a winning ISP strategy: assure potential users that they will be able to exit your service without having to dump their existing email address.
Actually, I would go so far as to say this is a two-fer on implementing Joel strategies, because it also creates a form of "stealth lock-in". Not the nasty, brutish kind of lock-in that says "we own your email address; you just rented it from us while you were our customer". It's just that switching to any other ISP would require said user to make the domain nameserver change themselves. Not any harder than changing your car's air filter (air, not even oil), but still something most people just aren't prepared to do.
10:10:37 PM 
|
|
