What can the telecom industry learn from the “dot-bomb” collapse of Internet companies in 2000?
Rakuten Symphony CMO Geoff Hollingworth believes that a great progress can be made in a tough economic time. As he writes in Pipeline Magazine, “Change comes faster than usual and is unavoidable when times are hard. I predict we will see hard business decisions made around sustainability, supply chain industrialization, smart use of cloud, and improved automation and network delayering.”
The dot-bomb reset the internet industry to grow and become the force it is today. A more recent example of the industry’s response to hard times is the COVID-19 pandemic. With the world staying home, telecom transformed and modernized its customer care support centers so that employees could work remotely without an impact on their customers. Now the executives that made those decisions can look back on that time and see that significant progress was made.
The way that 2023 is shaping up will force the industry to make more radical, harder business decisions, Hollingworth writes. This change doesn’t necessarily hinge on a particular technology like Open RAN—instead, change needs to happen faster. He continues, “If we are all being honest, the industry is no longer keeping up with the speed of technology happening outside of our bubble. I predict that for many operators, a lot of the projects they’ve been dancing with—these ‘impractical ideas’—could very likely turn out to be growth engines.”
2023 is looking like a tough economic year and that will force the telecom industry to change. But these changes will reset the smart MNOs for the challenges of the future. Geoff anticipates that executives will look back at 2023 and see how being forced to make hard decisions made great things come from a hard environment.
To read more of Geoff’s insights, here’s a link to the article.
