Did you notice that our previous article (What does the future hold for telco?) touched on scarcity and abundance in telco as well as how the dynamics of those are changing?
Have you ever stopped to think how these changing dynamics of scarcity / abundance might impact the business and revenue models of yourself personally or your companies in the future?
Let’s have a look at a few examples:
Abundance:
- Basic telecommunications services (ie bitstreams), as discussed in that previous article
- Information, as demonstrated in the recent whirlwind of conversations about ChatGPT
- Compute and storage
- Geographic maps (and the many use-cases that make use of them such as navigation, marketing overlays, etc)
- Manufacturing, of anything and everything, including consumer electronics that act as an onramp to the worlds of telco / OSS/BSS
- Labour, especially in developing regions
- Capital, including angel and crowdfunding
- Applications
- Content – Media and Entertainment, including the proliferation of television, radio and recordings such as YouTube, podcasts, social media, etc on almost any topic imaginable
- Training materials and shared knowledge
- An ability to talk and hypothesise
- etc
Scarcity:
- Identifying connections, gaps and patterns in a firehose of information
- An ability to turn that information arbitrage into insights that are actionable or persuasive (or both)
- People’s attention (trusted relationships), of the type that is earned rather than forced (eg readers who look forward to reading and sharing your ideas rather than readers who are tricked or spammed into consuming your content)
- Privacy and trust, particularly via digital communication mechanisms
- An ability to create complex sales, connecting capital with labour / information / technology, that provide employment for others
- Creativity / art (noting that digital art is arguably becoming abundant via generative AI, but it still needs creativity to direct the AI tools)
- Personalised service
- An ability to deliver
- The commitment to deeply absorb training, implement and learn to assimilate new skills
- An operational moat (often brand-related)
- etc
Business models can be created out of both abundance and scarcity, but the approaches are vastly different.
The items in the abundance column need a model built on speed, scale, etc. I’m sure you can think of companies that correspond to each dot-point. They’ll often be some of the most iconic brands in the world. The problem with this model is that the windows of opportunity / arbitrage are shrinking, as demonstrated by the genie-rative AI escaping from the bottle (like this $600 Stanford project (named Alpaca) being able to go head to head with ChatGPT). It takes a lot of skill, effort and evolution to maintain a competitive advantage.
The items in the scarcity column tend to need a model built on uniqueness, personalisation (anti-scale) and creating value for others. In many cases, this also requires a never-ending evolution, which perhaps reinforces the concept of “steering towards areas of greatest opportunity” as discussed in another recent article called “What’s your Everest?”
It seems we can’t quite get away from the need to change and evolve in the telco and OSS/BSS industries, regardless of whether we’re working with scarcity or abundance. The status-quo will be the status-dead within a few short years. Yet, how many major pivots have we actively initiated in recent years (versus being forced into)? How have we evolved to cope with major flips from scarcity to abundance (notice how most / all of the dot-points in the abundance column would’ve been in the scarcity column only a few years back?)
I know for sure that Passionate About OSS won’t be able to compete on abundance factors.
How about you? What’s your personal future more closely tied to – elements of scarcity or abundance? How about your company’s? How is your career evolving to cope / adapt and remain relevant? I’d love to hear your thoughts and stories!!