We had a saying, “People who know, do. Others teach or manage.”
Why look at papers instead of at the world. Google search, by itself, is incredibly disruptive and it lives on the incredibly disruptive WWW which lives on the incredibly disruptive Internet, which is run on incredibly disruptive optic fibers. How ld is all that.
Around 1990 there was a Business Week article about the ten most efficient technologies of the time. I wrote a letter to the editor:
You missed two quality services available in the U. S.: the telephone and the Postal Service (‘‘The Quality Imperative,’’ Special Issue, Oct. 25). If defects are to be measured as bad connections per million calls made or pieces not delivered per million pieces mailed, then both are tops. Telephones and mail boxes are available everywhere. Both services are inexpensive – what else can you get for the 29¢ cost of a first-class stamp or the 25¢ cost of a local call?
In the U. S., most people place their own calls. Phone service in Venezuela is so bad that executives have a secretary to make phone calls. This introduces extra people in the process, and a lot of time is wasted until both executives finally get on the line. This alone must cost Venezuela thousands of wasted man-hours.
In the U. S., millions of bills (for telephone, gas, electricity, credit cards, water, BUSINESS WEEK, etc.) are delivered and paid by mail. In Venezuela, no one dares put a check in the mail. Consequently, payments are made in person, and, again, thousands of man-hours are wasted.
In the U. S., the telephone and the Postal Service are marketing tools (telemarketing, junk mail). The telephone supports other services such as E-mail, fax, 800 and 900 numbers, and emergency (911) services. It is so good and so transparent 1 that your writers didn’t even think about it (except for the software glitch that paralyzed the system for a few hours). The good news is that Venezuela just sold 40% of its state-owned telephone system to a private group headed by GTE. 2
Denny Schlesinger
Caracas
The Captain
1 - I highlighted transparent because they mistakenly printed ‘apparent’ not understanding that they were so good they were invisible.
2 - Chavez re-nationalized CANTV and service declined.
PS: I had lost my copy of the letter. In 2008 BusinessWeek sent me a copy. That’s efficiency!
