Pawlenty to be McCain’s running mate, according to futures market

The major news outlets, including the Drudge Report, have yet to report the identity of Senator McCain’s vice presidential running mate but within the past hour Intrade.com has seen a spike in the futures of Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and a parallel drop in those of Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

This is one of the most useful demonstration of the power of information and the futures market that I have seen in a very long time. While I like Pawlenty and think it's an excellent choice, I am a bit disturbed about what Intrade.com is also telling us about the likely winner of the election in November.

Analyzing FiOS from an MBA perspective

Today’s New York Times had an article on the progress that Verizon is making in its endeavor to use fiber optics to deploy internet, video, and landline voice services to major markets around the country. The article interviewed various analysts and industry experts on whether Verizon will ever be able to recoup the $23 billion invested into the FiOS product.

 

The paper’s web site features a very detailed walkthrough of the analysis by Craig Moffett, Harvard Business School alum and analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, who has been extremely bearish on Verizon’s latest investment. Moffett carefully weights the amount invested into FiOS versus its benefits. His analysis touched on many of the major topics I learned during my first semester in business school. It talked about strategy (a disruptive innovation created a need for traditional telecom companies to respond), finance (tax shield, discounted cash flow), financial accounting (how FiOS allows Verizon to make its balance sheets look better), cost accounting (how to allocate costs to calculate a cost per customer), marketing (lifetime value per customer ), some of the major topics anyone with an MBA is expected to understand.

 

I hope the folks at the Harvard Business School Press decide to write a case on this sometime in the future.

AT&T High Speed Internet service's latest marketing ploy

A friend of mine in Chapel Hill recently called AT&T, his landline provider, and ordered the AT&T High Speed Internet service, delivered via DSL. He quickly received in the mail his Motorola DSL modem and instructions on how to hook up the service. When he was unable to get the service working after having clearly connected his devices properly, he turned to AT&T for assistance.

 

It wasn’t until after multiple phone calls and at least two appointments with a technician going out onto his property that he found an AT&T representative who told him the true reason why the last light on his modem was not blinking properly. His location was physically too far from the central office to receive the provisioning for the DSL service.

 

Even though my MBA comes with a concentration in marketing, I have yet to come across a business situation where a service provider has embarked on a strategy of marketing a service to customers who are physically unable to receive the service. Maybe that’s why I didn’t get too far during my second year in business school when I interviewed for the AT&T Management Leadership Program.