Opinion: We have failed

Telstra is asking people to pay a monthly fee for stuff you can get elsewhere for much less, or often for free.

But guess what – they’re going to sell a shedload of this stuff.

Why? Because we have failed to make it easy for punters to get the technology they need from us resellers.

And the tech media have failed to let the punters know where to get it and how much they should be paying.

There’s no other explanation for Telstra’s pricing for T-Suite, which no doubt had every reseller who read the story spraying coffee over their monitor as they gagged and giggled.

But hey, rewind to around 1980 or so, when IBM came out with it’s lame PC which was far less powerful than computers you could already buy, and cost nearly twice as much.

Back then, resellers laughed until they cried which happened when they realised they should have signed up with IBM despite having better, faster, cheaper PCs already on the shelves, which nobody wanted.

In 2008, the IBM equivalent is Telstra.

And they’re going to eat our lunch, breakfast, dinner and probably our kiddies’ play-lunches too, by offering the same stuff we’re offering, for more money, with fewer features and lower customer service.

And the punters are going to love it, because they can just tick the box, and it will happen automatically, and the telephone bill will just cost a bit more than it used to.

Sure, one day they’re going to count it all up and wonder where the money went, but Telstra will have taken a huge slice of the market by then, helping to send a lot of resellers to the wall.

So the punters won’t have the same choice they do now, so most of them will just keep paying Telstra for the privilege of using stuff they could have gotten for nothing from their local friendly reseller.

If only we’d done our jobs properly.

But we didn’t.

We have failed.