With Vonage, MagicJack and Skype offering such cheap alternatives - even for mobile phones, what do you guys see happening to the big guys like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint?
With Vonage, MagicJack and Skype offering such cheap alternatives - even for mobile phones, what do you guys see happening to the big guys like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint?
Good point. When my parents went to Mexico over the summer, we had to talk via IM and microphone because of the difficulty of calling the U.S. I think the large companies are going to lose a lot of customers, if they continue to overcharge for what others offer for less.
I agree with mewlover. It's the simple law of demand, the more they charge, the less people want it; the less they charge, the more people want it. The big companies are actually ignoring the exact opposite of that, the law of supply which states that the more supply, the higher the price and the less the supply, the lower the cost. Since they offer most of the same things, they should be trying to lower their prices so more people will buy without losing profit. Unless, without those higher prices, they cannot make a profit.
Obviously, the demand for the services of these larger businesses hasn't dropped low enough, otherwise they would have dropped their prices already.
Big phone companies have to advantage of having high prices. With the money they've massed, they can easily created methods similar to Skype and offer it at low enough prices that Sykpe goes bankrupt and then raise prices again. It's easy enough to do, even easier to simply buy out the company. Neither of these have happened yet, leading me to believe that these new companies just aren't that big of a threat. I'm not going to pretend to know how these smaller companies work, but they definetly do not make nearly as much money as larger businesses do, meaning that they will be growing very slowly, slow enough that AT&T could come out with "Panorama" or something that does the same thing.
i have to agree with the others, sorry Zero...anyway, if these competitors were a real threat to the big companies, then they would have done something, at least by now they would have...unless of course these big shots are being egotistic, and absolutely ignoring the fact that these smaller companies could, in affect, be a huge threat, if said smaller companies make smart choices, and find a good way of convening their better services to the masses...that is, if, like Reliability said, the big shots don't buy out the new competition....
Actually, these competitors shoot themselves in the foot. Skype has both Iphone and Android apps, so there's reallly no reason to drop your cell phone for these services if you can already get them on the phone in the first place. It's the same with e-readers like the Amazon Kindle, who competes with smartphones for users yet offers apps like Android Kindle, making dedicated e-readers a waste of money.
it'll be hard for these big companies to drop for a while cause too many people still use their services...
yes they've added internet calling and similar things but we've had that since the beggining of the internet when someone thought to add a camera and mic to their computer...
verizon may die cause they're strictly cell but at&t and sprint might not or at least if they do will do it sometime in the future...
sprint and AT&T are phone companies that branch out and will probably start adding themselves to the skype and similar communications connections...
right now they have high prices but yes they could lower them greatly and so long as they go down far enough to keep gaining money and not lose it they should be alright and still be able to compete with everyone else...
yes if they ignore these smaller companies its gonna bite'em in the butt later...