Law 5: “With new technology, you can’t ask people what they want – you can only show them what is possible”

I have been attending a significant international event run by an organisation which represents global mobile carriers, whose subscribers constitute half the world’s mobile phone population. You would think that in such company, Telstra with less than 1% of this subscriber base, would be something of a minnow, but in fact it is refreshing to find the awe and respect we command. It makes a change from the constant carping of self-proclaimed ‘experts’ such as Michael Sainsbury and Paul Budde (I wonder what qualifications those 2 actually have?) back in Australia.

Our leadership in deploying high speed broadband across our entire mobile footprint has got everyone talking, because it changes the game. I was sitting at dinner last night with the CTO of a major world telco and a partner in one of the half dozen or so global leading venture capital firms, and their questions typified the interest we get. The top of mind question is “what are people doing with the network?” We were able to tell them about mobile breast screening clinics, web designers floating around the Whitsundays, workforce management systems, corporate executives, etc, etc.

The point is that if you had asked us before we built it what people would do with the network it would have been very hard to predict. In fact, if you are ask people “would you do this” for something new, the answer is invariably no. This is typified by the famous case of the Herman Miller chair, which I believe is the best selling chair ever. The chair was a radical new design and every focus group they did before it went on the market told them that people would hate it. There are many other notorious examples of this (e.g. Thomas Watson saying that there would never be a need for more than 5 computers in the world).

However, if you build a platform which removes barriers then suddenly people do things no one would have thought of. When the designers of the original GSM mobile network put SMS into the system, no one envisaged that people would find so many things to do with it. If someone had said to me at the time that 10 years later my wife would find SMS an indispensible tool in her daily life, I would have advised them to seek psychiatric help. In the case of our Next G™ network, the barrier we removed was a lack of mobile network data speed. Once the network was in place, all sorts of things, that people really wanted to do all along, but couldn’t – e.g. mobile breast screening – became possible.

Ultimately this law could be rephrased as “people who 2nd guess human nature always get it wrong”. However, if you create the opportunity, then people find a way to utilise it to their advantage.