Ben's Bit Shuffle

Thursday, June 02, 2005

KPN and VoIP

The Volkskrant yesterday had a half page article (page 8 with header insert on the front page) about KPN (the Dutch incumbent telecom company) realizing this whole internet thing is going to cost them money. Hilarious.
The article is pretty bad: file sharing costs record companies "millions" (millions where? to whom?), and you need 2 computers to use Skype (SkypeIn and Out do not exist, no sir)
A choice quote (from the KPN corpodrone) is "We nemen langzaam afscheid van de telefoontik" (tl as: We are slowly moving away from per minute telecoms). The guy is going to get to watch is #1 revenue center disintegrate from under him, and that's the only thing he has to say about his own VoIP offering: it's going to cannibalise the old-school phone market. With management like that you deserve everything you get.
One thing that the article gets right is the consumer confusion in the face of the many different pricing schemes. The silly names used by KPN for its different products doesn't help.

1 Comments:

  • True, a bit of a sad confirmation about KPN, desperately trying to hang on :)

    Some manage to overdo the whole Skype / VoIP thing though ->
    http://gigaom.com/2005/06/02/skype-ceo-for-nobel-prize/

    By Anonymous Koen, at 09:37  

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