Business Traveller

For the last few years, some friends and I have been taking an annual sailing trip to various destination. I haven’t always made every one (and had to miss out on the Antiguan trips – that made me cry, let me tell you), but they are a bit of a highlight of my year.

This year the trip was booked for Cypress, and I was really looking forward to it. Things looked a little sketchy when our skipper (8 Ball) had to pull out of the trip, but we decided to go anyway. Kebab, our Cypriot mate, has been doing a bit of work in the background, and has managed to do a deal where – on this trip – we will all be doing our RYA (Royal Yacht Association) Skipper Licences!

It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a while, as it will allow me to go anywhere in the world and rent a yacht, so this is awesome! We’ll miss 8-Ball on this trip anyway, but I’m seriously stoked!

So an update on my fugitive status.

According to the lawyer that I have been paying, SARS (South African Revenue Service) have ‘evidence’ that I returned to South Africa in 2003, and resumed employment in South Africa. They won’t tell my lawyer what the evidence is – apparently I have to appear in person to request this.

Of course that would require that I fly to South Africa to appear in person, but I couldn’t do that, because with the arrest warrant that they have issued for me, I would be arrested at the airport, and getting released would require that I pay the tax bill…

Lawyer has suggested a slightly new tack. I’m now getting certified copies of my South African passport made, as well as any other evidence I can lay my hands on to prove that I have not been in South Africa (unless I have unwittingly become the victim of an evil cloning company that is out to destroy me…). We (well, not me – obviously, I would do pretty much anything to avoid a South African prison – so my lawyer) will then present the courts with this proof that I couldn’t possibly have been in South Africa, and therefore couldn’t have a tax bill.

I have heard anecdotal evidence that it isn’t just me. A number of people that have been living here are currently being pursued in the same way by SARS. My advice to anybody that has been living abroad is check for arrest warrants before you fly! My lawyer informs me that SARS has technically broken the law in the way that they have gone about things with me. Apparently the way it is supposed to work is that they have to issue a summons for me to appear in court (this was never done), and make a reasonable attempt to find me (this was never done. The first time they did this was when they wanted to seize my assets). Only if I fail to respond to the summons can they issue a judgement against me – but that doesn’t seem to have stopped them.

Bastards!

One of the best things about working for a massive telecoms company is that you have the kind of money to do things that wouldn’t be possible in a smaller company.

One of the worst things about working for a massive telecoms company is that people are so set in their ways and always playing a political game that you hardly ever get to do anything at all.

I guess it’s nothing new. I saw a quotation once that was attributed to Confucius: ‘A man that is good with a hammer thinks that everything is a nail’. Whoever said it, they must have at some point worked with people very much like those that work for International Telecoms companies…

So, starting with the fun bit. For the longest time, the people tasked with strategy in our company sat in dark rooms crying about the frightening spectre of Voice over IP telecoms. Some hoped that if they ignored it for long enough, it would just go away. Others thought that if they told enough people loudly enough that it would never take off, they could make it so. They couldn’t.

Slowly, with a fair amount of coaxing from people like me, they started to realise that it wasn’t quite as scary as they thought it would be to mobile telephony companies. They noticed that what most of the users of VoIP were using it for was to get cheap or free international phone calls. This was great, because people hardly ever use their mobile phones for this sort of call anyway. It’s too expensive. So here, then, was an opportunity to tap a new market without hurting the existing one. <cue the angels with harps>

For me, this meant I got the holy grail of working in technoology. I got to do something interesting and new. Quick as a flash, I was off to visit our chosen partners in the states. We were a perfect match. They had the desktop clients with the features that people wanted. We had an existing billing relationship with the customers, and could make the advertising more valuable through being able to target it more accurately. We would share the revenues, and everybody would be happy.

Yes, VoIP would still go via the Internet, and as a result, it would still be a little flakey, but people accept that sort of thing when it’s cheap. We would also be investing a fair bit of time and money into making it less flakey in future releases, and be the new leaders in this brave new world. We have even been exchanging ideas for how to improve it all, and I’ve been loving it.

fantastic

Then last Friday a meeting was held with telecoms poeple. It was a very serious meeting. Full of very senior people. Senior people who know mobile telephony very well. They have all been doing mobile telephony all their adult lives. Guess what they decided?

Yup. They decided that, contrary to the evidence and the success of companies in this space, what customers really want from a consumer VoIP proposition is… wait for it… To pay exactly the same as if they were using their mobile phones.

They then decided that the architecture we had put together was obviously way too simplistic and didn’t include nearly enough boxes with expensive names like Nokia, Erickson or Siemens on them. In short, it just didn’t look like good old fashioned expensive mobile telephony. Surely this was an outrage. They have now commissioned some very serious mobile telephony people to come and show me the error of my ways. Silly me.

First thing they did was change the architecture to ensure that every single VoIP call that isn’t pure PC to PC will incur exactly the same charges to our company as if it was a phone call being made from a mobile. And the new architecture doesn’t make any space for changing the routing. Basically, if you are a UK Mobile customer, no matter where you are calling to, your call will always be treated exactly as if you made a mobile call from the UK. My protests that I can currently use my VoIP client to call my parents in South Africa for €0.055 per minute, and this approach would mean that I would end up paying £1 per minute was dismissed as irrelevant.

Then they removed any mechanism for informing customers what it would be that they are paying. Gone is the old friendly ‘This call is costing you €0.055 per minute’. No, now you’ll have to wait to the end of the month to see that the call that used to cost you €3.30 on Sunday to phone your Mom for an hour will now have cost you £60 – and nobody warned you when you ‘upgraded’ to the new one that we gave you.

So then, the project went from being fun, cutting edge, and something that would genuinely make money and could become the leader in the industry with patented IPR and make me a technical hero god – has instead become something that customers will hate, complain about, have regulators involved, and fail spectacularly on the international stage taking our share price with it.

Bastards!