What happens if we cross high-speed trading with OSS?

The law of diminishing marginal utility is a theory in economics that says that with increased consumption, satisfaction decreases.
ou are at a park on a winter’s day, and someone is selling hot dogs for $1 each. You eat one. It tastes good and satisfies you, so you have another one, and another etc. Eventually, you eat so many, that your satisfaction from each hot dog you consume drops. You are less willing to pay the $1 you have to pay for a hot dog. You would only consume another if price drops. But that won’t happen, so you leave, and demand for the hot dogs falls
.”
Wikibooks’ Supply and Demand.

Yesterday’s blog went back to the basics of supply and demand to try to find ways to innovate with out OSS. Did the proposed model help you spawn any great new ideas?

If we look at another fundamental consumer model, The Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility, we can see that with more consumption, there comes less consumer satisfaction. Sounds like what’s happening for telcos globally. There’s ever greater consumption of data, but an increasing disinterest in who transports that data. Network virtualisation, 5G and IoT are sometimes quoted as the saviours of the telco industry (looking only at the supply side), but they’re inevitably going to bring more data to the table, leading to more disinterest right? Sounds like a race to the bottom.

Telcos were highly profitable in times of data shortage but in this age of abundance, a new model is required rather than just speeds and feeds. As OSS providers, we also have to think beyond just bringing greater efficiency to the turn-on of speeds and feeds. But this is completely contra to the way we normally think isn’t it? Completely contra to the way we build our OSS business cases.

What products / services can OSS complement that are in short supply and are highly valued? Some unique content (eg Seinfeld) or apps (Pokemon Go) might fit this criteria, but only for relatively short time periods. Even content and apps are becoming more abundant and less valued. Perhaps the answer is in fulfilling short-term inefficiencies in supply and demand (eg dynamic pricing, dynamic offers, un-met demands, etc) as posed in yesterday’s blog. All of these features require us to look at our OSS data with a completely different lens though.

Our analytics engines might be less focused on time-to-repair and perhaps more on metrics such as analysis to offer (which currently take us months, thus missing transient market inefficiency windows). And not just for the service providers, but as a service for their customers. Is this high-speed trading crossed with OSS??

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