Over lunch I read an advertisement by The Linde Group in the Economist Nov. 25 issue. A nice double page green landscape mirrored in a lake (could have been maybe Greenland or Iceland) with the heading "0.00034% away from absolute perfection?". The little text in the ad talked about Linde Group's Six Sigma process that can reduce errors in processes to a level as small as 3.4 per million. Adding to this number they said "And that will move us forward. Objectively."

When I read this I immediately had to think of Jack Trout's, the American marketing evangelist's book Differentiate or Die. He and his co-author Steve Rivkin write in this book what they think are USPs and what are not USPs. In chapter 4 in the book they ask: "Who among us doesn't appreciate a better-made product, or a zero-defects guarantee. But does quality pay?" His conclusion later is that in most cases additional investments into quality mostly do not pay off in terms of improving the company's overall competitive position. Mostly because everyone will try to match the others quality and differentiating on ISO 9000, Six Sigma, TQM or any other quality program buzzword is very hard or not possible at all.

This all makes a certain amount of sense, I thought, and applies to the above-mentioned Linde Group's ad, that most likely will have no impact on their business: but then I also thought of the many e.g. Swiss companies that have "Made in Switzerland" on their websites and other marketing collaterals and seem to have success with it since it represents a highest quality label. So "the jury is still out on this one" as the book authors also say. To think that quality is automatically a differentiator, though, is too simplistic, and therefore I think the ad I mentioned didn't try quite hard enough.

I received a free copy of the Telecommunications International magazine, which seems to be getting thinner and thinner. I won't comment on the editorial content, although much could be said here as well. Instead I went through the full-page advertisements and listed all the marketing blablabla that everyone seems to be using, and by doing so not really differentiating in any way. In fact, I think that the Marcom departments and their PR firms, who really have no clue what they are actually writing about, most likely have all similar lists of buzzwords that they re-use for press releases and super expensive magazine ads. I personally think that those ads have zero impact and are a total waste of money. But OK that's my opinion. Here a sample of the list...

• smooth and quick upgrade
• scalable
• high-capacity
• low CapEx and OpEx
• lowest TCO
• value-added services
• non-blocking, high interface density
• help customer with revenue growth
• carrier-class
• end-to-end triple play
• higher QoS
• fully integrated, highly efficient, full-performance
• true interoperability
• next-generation networks
• best ROI, best cost/performance ratio
• ...

According to Gartner Dataquest, the sales of mobile phones could for the first time ever reach 1 billion units in 2006. Some other trends can be summarized as follows:

• Consolidation, fewer players seem to be dominant and growing the most: Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, LG: the rest continue to lose market share
• AsiaPac grows the most with +55%, but also in Europe +9% is not a bad number for a "saturated" market, total worldwide market growth in Q3 was +22%

The guys from Nokialist reviewed an early production version of this to be expected in Q1 2007 Symbian smartphone. The review shows that Nokia will soon bring out its probably most feature complete and at the same time highly compact phone ever. If you are - like me - back in the mobile phone market beginning of 2007 then this phone should be on your list of the ones to check out in more detail. One other thing I learned is that due to the super-fast innovation cycles in mobile phones a one year phone contract seems to be the maximum to commit to. 24 months proved to be too long.

• Lots of things have happened at Siemens and not all of it good. The recent bribing scandal has only added to this chaotic picture. Fortunately the economy is doing quite well, so at least business is humming at Siemens, and does not add yet another negative.
• Late, but now they have the numbers to back it up in the US: The immigrants are the reason for the high-tech startup boom in the last 15 years. "The study found that over the past 15 years, immigrants have started 1 in 4 (25 percent) U.S. public companies that were venture-backed, representing a market capitalization of more than $500 billion. Moreover, a survey of today's private, venture-backed start-up companies in the U.S. estimated that 47 percent have immigrant founders." Something not surprising if you have lived and worked in the Silicon Valley e.g. And finally now we also know why high-tech startups have not been successful in similar ways in Europe because they don't have the same number of highly qualified and entrepreneurial immigrants as in the US! And a good (albeit not the major) part of US immigrants are Europeans looking for better conditions in the "new world"...
• Man against machine is what Heise Online announced when tomorrow the number 3 chess player in the world will play against the best selling chess program Deep Fritz 10 in Bonn, Germany. As they mention, the currently overall strongest chess engine program is Rybka, though. I have downloaded it now and will lose a couple of games to keep me humble. The price money BTW is 0.5 million USD and if he wins against the machine another half a million.

In June 2007 the Strasbourg-Paris part of the high-speed train network - which will eventually lead all the way to Budapest, via Munich and Vienna - opens, shortening journey times from Germany and Switzerland to Paris substantially.

Basel and Paris, for example, will be just 3.5 hours apart, which reduces total travel time by 1 1/2 hours so by one third!

That basically means that trips will often make more sense by train than by plane. If you count traveling to from the airports, plus check-in and check-out times at both ends, then it is equally fast and certainly less stressful to take the train!