@David, @Aki, Erik, @All, I would also queue for Safaricom milk, because I'm pleasantly surprised by their innovation: m-pesa, 3g, m-kesho and now mixit. You'd expect a near-monopoly to sit back and rest on its laurels, not so with safcom. Safcom is clearly playing an important role in Kenya's IT space. However, Aki's concerns are also legitimate. Consider this: If Kenyans allow a private company to build and operate a road between two major cities, should the company also be allowed to control the usage of that road? Yes. But to what extent? At the minimum, the company must be allowed to set standards for vehicles and for road-behavior - standards that will maintain efficiency and earn them profits. It should charge toll by the ton. But, should it also be allowed to: - certify/license the vehicles that travel along that road? Or should this be done by an independent body? - form a trucking company, and disqualify trucks made by other companies from using the road? - reserve the road end-points for their exclusive use: to operate their own restaurants, gas stations and other businesses? - stretch your imagination I experienced this first-hand in Ghana (2008) when we were rolling out a mobile banking/payments platform. MTN and Ghana Telcom, the two dominant players, delayed the project for over 8 months. In the meantime, MTN started talking to our banks about their mobile money product - which was "under development". (http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Company%20Industry/M%20pesa%20reaps%20fro...). They simply took a "go slow" on our case, denying us even SMS short-codes and and stringing us along all that time. Our product did launch with Zain GH, and through proxy, on their networks, but were they mad to discover that.... But I digress. The one year it took MTN to roll out its mobile money, was a wasted opportunity for Ghana's IT. My hope is that Safcom exhibits no such tendencies. But, control of infrastructure is an immensely responsible, powerful and lucrative situation. And the temptation to abuse it can be too strong. My point is that, as long as we let the road constructor to profit from being a restauranter, a gas-station manager, a licensing body, a car/truck manufacturer, a transporter, a real estate company - all at the same time, we should not expect it to focus on making better roads that relay more tons/second, and to grant equal usage of its infrastructure to its competitors in the the services domain. This is where CCK comes in. Since most of telco's services originate from attempts to create demand and to generate traffic, the services should be transferred away from their control as soon as they outlive that purpose. I believe that CCK should strive to police the fidelity of the telcos to their original role, instead of attempting to micro-manage their business processes. Do telcos provide reasonably equal access to all service providers and users? For example, Safcom and MPesa are two separate entities, but are other mobile-money operators granted equal access as MPesa to Safcom's infrastructure? We should not fear when service sector businesses leverage other services to improve their bottom lines. These normally form linkages that create value for the consumer. What I think we should fear are infrastructure companies that dabble into services. After using that control to decimate their competition in the services domain, they will most surely stop innovating. My two cents Olive trees are important. They represent everything that roots us, anchors us, identifies us and locates us in this world - whether it be belonging to a family, a community, a tribe, a nation, a religion or, most of all, a place called home. - Thomas Friedman - "The Lexus And The Olive Tree" ________________________________ From: David Kiania | Asentric Consulting Ltd <kianiadee@gmail.com> To: Skunkworks Mailing List <skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke> Sent: Fri, May 21, 2010 5:13:11 AM Subject: Re: [Skunkworks] Mixit: Safaricom Rules Eric, I concur with you it's an import with a huge following. If Mixit is available for all operators, why should we bash safcom for launching it first? Sorry developers: Safaricom owes you nothing and having been in the industry long enough I can say with confidence, we expect our pitches to be treated preferentially for the simple fact that it's done locally. Issues of scalability, security are paramount and no operator will allow you to use their live network as a test bed. Secondly and even more painfully, 'the developers' are single clusters of people who have all the ideas and the code in their head (who happen to be very moody). They work when they want and don't bother them if they are not up to it. That has nothing to do with Safcom, the market is awash with unfinished projects and missing developers. Being a listed company they must do all they can to secure their numbers, period. Kiania On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 12:57 PM, Erik Hersman <erik@zungu.com> wrote:
Just to point out, Safaricom didn't create Mxit, they're importing this from South Africa. Basically, using their marketing muscle to get major inroads in the data space (as you pointed out). How is MTN SA losing KES 80M per day? Aren't they making some of that back on data charges alone? Mxit isn't tied to just one network, you can access it from anywhere you can get a data signal, so Zain and Yu will work here too.
Erik Hersman www.whiteafrican.com | @whiteafrican
On May 21, 2010, at 11:55 AM, David Kiania | Asentric Consulting Ltd wrote:
For all the flack Safcom gets on this list we have to give them marks for innovation and forethought. In today's newspaper they have launched Mixit (http://www.mxitlifestyle.com/) is a Peer-to-Peer IM client that runs on mobile-to-mobile and desktop-to-mobile. While some see this as cannibalizing SMS revenues, it's a stroke of genius because they still stand to make cash from the data traffic as opposed to loosing it to a competitor all together. (Rule No. 4 in business: Cannibalize your revenue and business model before your competition does it for you)
After declining to support Mixit as a product, MTN SA now looses more than 8M Rand (KES 80M) a day, and the sad part, the app runs on their platform on either gprs/edge.
Kudos Safaricom, You Rock!
Kiania _______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list Skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks ------------ Skunkworks Server donations spreadsheet http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AopdHkqSqKL-dHlQVTMxU1VBdU1BSWJxdy1f... ------------ Skunkworks Rules http://my.co.ke/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=94 ------------ Other services @ http://my.co.ke
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