BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | Cable firms 'losing their lead'
Cable firms 'losing their lead'
by Nick Higham
BBC media correspondent
One day someone will find the true explanation for what went wrong at Britain's cable companies: how it was that they managed to throw away the advantages of arriving first in the market and of a superior technology to become casebook examples of mismanaged businesses
Nick higham really dislikes the cable companies. While this article has a lot of truth about mismanagement, it fails to make the point that in TV the chief supplier of programming is Sky. In telephony cable is competing against a former nationalised monopoly and in internet, well actually we're not doing too bad there.
What he also failed to mention was that while Sky and BT could focus on product development and customer service (not that they do the latter that well), they didn't have to grow a business by acquistion.
This aggressive policy pursued by ntl's still encumbant CEO, seemed like a good idea. But it drained resources, and lossed the focus of the senior management team because they kept having to figure out what to do with this newly acquired business. We are still feeling the effects of this as customers (and associates / employees). True, a more developed executive team may have handled these issues better (although few companies do seem to do well after acquisitions or mergers) but they wouldn't have won the race. Even with the billions in debt, cable never had anything like the financial backing of Sky or BT.
We could have been ahead technologically; we still have a theoretically better platform but we will be extremely lucky to catch either competitor given our current masters.
Posted by Paul Goodison at August 5, 2003 12:49 PM | TrackBack