Where Did the Wireless Jobs Go?
Source: Tom Loftus
Where Did the Wireless Jobs Go? The Wall Street Journal has a story on how the U.S. wireless industry has been hemorrhaging jobs, with a May employment report showing a 12-year low of 166,000. That is about 20,000 fewer jobs than June 2009. Meanwhile, industry revenue has grown 28%.
The story explains that advances in smartphone and network technology, and a preference by customers to go online and manage their own accounts, have made it easier for wireless carriers to make cuts in the call-center workers and salespeople that make up much of the work force. “It used to be you had to scale your customer-care resources linearly with the number of customers you had,” Dan Hays, a telecom consultant, told the Journal. “We don’t do that anymore.”
Wireless carriers such as Sprint Nextel have leveraged the technology shift, pushing to offer simpler service plans, phones and activavation processes to cut customer-service calls. Sprint has cut back the number of call centers from 74 in 2007 to 44 last year.
More layoffs are expected if AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile is approved.
The Journal notes that the wireless boom has created jobs elsewhere. The smartphone revolution has created its own ecosystem of tech, publishing and media opportunities. [WSJ]
Are Other Android Handset Makers Next? Speculation Builds after Apple Beats HTC in Patent Dispute: Late last week a U.S. International Trade Commission judge ruled that Taiwanese cellphone maker HTC had infringed on two Apple patents. These two patents, the Los Angeles Times technology blog reports, were filed in 1994 and 1996, well before the age of smartphones. One patent covers the sending of data over a network while the second explains a system that enables a user to perform a command on computer-generated data―i.e. opening up an email with mouse click or a swipe of your finger.
Both patents are so generic, the Guardian posits, that Apple could go after other Android cellphone makers for license fees. The industry is already the scene of numerous disputes. Most recently Apple filed complaints against Samsung Electronics. Apple and Nokia recently settled another case. Microsoft, meanwhile, collects licensing fees and other payments from several Android phone makers.
The Apple-HTC dispute is not completely resolved. A full commission will rule this December on whether to uphold or reverse the ruling. [WSJ, Los Angeles Times, Guardian]
The Origins of the ‘Google Doodle” and More Google Trivia: Douglas Edwards, Google Employee No. 59, has an excerpt from his Google days memoir, “I’m Feeling Lucky,” in the Wall Street Journal. [WSJ]
MySpace Founder: Is Social in Google’s DNA? Tom Anderson thinks that users―not algorithms�Cshould have ultimate control over filtering Google+ streams. [TechCrunch]
The Internet of Things: Cisco has an infographic tracking the increasing number of “things”―smartphones, tablets, cattle(!)―connected to the Internet. One takeaway: By the end of this year, 20 “typical households” will generate more Internet traffic than the Internet in 2008.
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