Communication Breakdown

The analysts have come out in force to mourn (sort of) the passing of DT head honcho Kai Uwe-Ricke, who got the boot yesterday. He'll probably be replaced by Rene Obermann, CEO of T-Mobile.

Ovum's Dan Bieler put it down to DT losing ground in its home market and "irritating" staff and unions by lining up tens of thousands of staff members for the chop (I can see how that might be irritating). Reacting to DT's reasoning that choosing Obermann will ensure continuity, Bieler said he found this argument "odd" and quite reasonably asked how you ensure continuity by sacking the CEO.

Over to Forrester's amiable Lars Godell: "The departure... doesn't solve any of DT’s structural, long-term problems so people need to be realistic when assessing the potential for quick change at the company... DT has been much slower than its peers BT and France Telecom (FT) to embrace change, competition, and the need to restructure its operations as a fully integrated telco". Hooray for BT.

But Godell does have a warning: "Obermann has been co-responsible for the management mistakes over the last three to six years, including the overspend on 3G networks and licenses, and the lack of internal coordination, so he needs to acknowledge those mistakes and what has been learnt from them in order to be fully effective as the new CEO". But is getting promoted the right time to say you're sorry?

The always-informed James Enck of Daiwa Securities says there were some "pretty nasty behind-the-scenes spats and subterfuge" behind the move, though he points to this page to prove it. And my German sucks, so that's me out of the loop.

News just in: NTL's addressing its customer service issues by adding "a new back office system from Convergys". Not a bad idea at all, seeing as it currently has (count 'em) four billing and customer service systems in place. As the PR department itself admits, "NTL's move comes at an interesting time in its history"...

"Convergys's system was used by Telewest to provide its customers with a single bill for all services (TV, Internet, telephone), resulting in a reduction in customer calls and an increase in customer satisfaction," it says here.

As a former customer of Telewest (and of NTL before that, prior to their merger), I will keep my opinion to myself on this one.

Oh dear oh dear - turns out Richard Granger, head of the NHS's IT revamp (the largest civilian IT project in the world, lest you forget) failed his computer studies course at Bristol Uni. This could explain a lot. Mind you, he passed on the second attempt - but only because his mum appealed to Princess Anne. Oh, and that'll be the mum that went to the Evening Standard with this embarrassing story, and is now a councillor campaigning against NPfIT.

Bizarre.

Auntie reports a YouTube-based video of LA police beating up on someone. In a way, it's incredible to think it's taken this long for something like that to turn up on YT - Rodney King II, anyone?

So is Apple going to introduce its own mobile phone after all? According to this piece from the good folks at InformationWeek, a couple of patents recently acquired by the iPeople could point in that direction, but... y'know, we've heard this before.

Hmm.

That said, where there's smoke there's usually fire, and it wouldn't be an enormous surprise to see an iPhone hit the shelves in the next couple of years. We can only hope that Apple learned its lesson from that debacle with the Motorola ROKR (Apple insisted that the phone only be able to contain 100 songs, so as to avoid too much competition for the iPod itself), which had the phone manufacturer running in tears to Linux for its next music-centric device.

Obviously Apple would be producing this one by itself but, as usual, we'll believe it when we see it.