Comments
Re: Seriousness of intent
@Alison: This is how you build an irrational urge and desire for the product/service -- keeping it largely unavaiable geographically.
Same thing with Sonic. There used to be no Sonic around here (Boston area), but boy did Sonic have tons of ad buys on all the local stations. Sonic commercials at every commercial break -- sometimes more than one per commercial break!
All of us wanted Sonic. We needed Sonic. We craved Sonic.
Finally, a few years ago, a Sonic opened in Peabody on Route 1 (north of the city a few miles). Lines of cars were backed up onto the highway.
I rarely see Sonic ads anymore.
Alison
3/30/2016 9:04:28 AM
User Rank Silver
Re: Seriousness of intent
I agree with Brian. I'm in Central Florida, where we're anxiously awaiting Verizon FiOS to compete with Brighthouse (now owned by TWC). Google isn't even a consideration given its extremely limited footprint around the country. I vaguely recall Orlando pitching itself to Google for Fiber; the nearest city on the 'possible' contenders map is Tampa. And I think that's the only city in the entire state of Florida. Given Google's vast wallet, if it was serious about this market, it could have covered much more of the country by now.
elizabethv
3/30/2016 7:54:15 AM
User Rank Platinum
A phone service?
The number of people I know with phones outside of their cell phones I can literally count on one hand. And while I occasionally see benefits to having a house phone, they generally center around the fact that it would be easier for my 3-year-old to only have to memorize one phone number than to worry about him having to memorize both mine and his dad's phone number. I can't imagine this is a move to meet an overwhelming demand for home phones. (Maybe people really want to be able to fill in that section on forms?) But if it isn't a move to meet such a demand, what is the reason for it? So that you can officially say you offer all three services? To offer a discount to customers who choose to "bundle" that isn't really a "discount" and instead makes Google more money? I would imagine expansion is good, but to me this just seems out of place.
JohnBarnes
3/30/2016 7:04:56 AM
User Rank Platinum
The dream of the better mousetrap
Emerson's (or at least crowdsource-based Emerson's) aphorism about building a better mousetrap and the world beating a path to your door has probably been quoted by everyone who went looking for money in technical advances since Emerson's time. Oddly, though it may be inspiring as philosophy for the innovators, it is nonsense as economics for the entrepreneur: people who already own perfectly adequate mousetraps do not necessarily want to invest in catching two more mice per decade, or free up time in their busy day from emptying the traps, or even spend less per trap when they replace it (if it is already very cheap or replaced only infrequently and ad hoc). But the dream remains that somehow you're going to get rich by replacing a common item with a slightly superior one.
People talk on scratchy phones all day long (indeed organizations spend a fair amount of time trying to stop them); will they change everything and add extra hassles for less scratchiness? Buy more things that appear in ads on devices bundled with their less scratchy phone? Where are the mice big enough or numerous enough to make a better trap worth the job of hacking through the woods to get to the lone inventor's cabin?
afwriter
3/30/2016 1:07:03 AM
User Rank Platinum
Really?
I am sure they have a plan; there is a reason why Google is a multi-billion dollar company and I am still paying off a 2004 Passat, but rolling out a traditional phone service seems like a step backwards. How many people under the age of 40 do you know that actually have a home phone? I have 2 young daughter and when it comes time to need that "home phone" we will just add another line to our mobile plan and keep that phone in the kitchen.
Seriousness of intent
Ultimately, challenging the incumbents to do better is a Good Thing, but Google isn't even half-hearted about Google Fiber -- it's more like quarter-hearted or tenth-hearted. The first trial was in 2011, and five years later it's available in only a small handful of cities and the service has a customer count in the low six-digits. In five years, AT&T and Verizon had U-verse and FiOS, respectively, available to millions of homes and had customer counts well into 7-digits.
Google Fiber might have been a market force, but somebody at Google would have had to decide to try, and I haven't seen any evidence that such a decision has been made.
--Brian Santo
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