Dip

What you do when your company heads towards out of business by a search giant conquering several categories. Google is launching a free sat-nav application integrated with search which you can use it on your phone. Garmin, Tom Tom and other related company’s shares just fell severely in the last days, and figures are not positive.

So what these companies should do? the dip is near and the turn should be strong, but the fact is that the question lies on what should have they done. One of many reasons GM might have failed was that it didn’t spot or believed in the green opportunities of the future auto industry, which could reduced people’s annual spending on cars with a valid reason behind. Yet, they kept insisting building bolder cars with high levels of gas consumption plus launching more and more brands losing focus.

GPS nav companies face the same irony when confronted with such market shift. Google is offering a free app which might be of a superior quality when compared with others charging around 50$ to 100$ US per app. Mobile is concentrating everything, and search is indeed the perfect match for such GPS services. As for the free model, that’s just how Google operates, along the long tail.

Toyota plans hundred years ahead, and as many say today that it is hard to plan next month in such rapid changing markets, I believe companies should definitely plan ahead several scenarios that can happen in the fast moving markets we see today. The key thing here is that they shouldn’t be able to react, but instead drive their industry and product categories as Google keeps on driving. Innovation is staggering and decisive today. If you had a Google next to you as your direct competitor what you would do today?

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A Public’s Company Inertia

RATP is the company behind the transportation service and the metro in Paris. RATP is broken. Every beginning of a month inside the metro stations we can see huge lines of people waiting to solve their problems with their monthly passes to access the metro.

After these huge lines of people we can spot a few unmotivated employees, usually two or four at a small office trying to deal with the crowd demands, which can span from acquiring their passes to technical problems solving or a need for more information in determined issues.

These small offices are present in a few key stations, 28 in fact within the whole Paris area (which has about 400 in total). The recharging machines also see huge lines of people as everyone tries to recharge their passes within the same day to not lose a single dime in the monthly period.

The fact that is a public company might be a strong reason why people from top to bottom actually don’t care that much about what happens. Not only this is normal here but also in many other countries throughout the world, as the key goals that drive state owned companies seem not driven to improve but to maintain. There is a complete inertia in RATP and also a lack of care in fact for the people who use the service.

Now, if we changed the scenario from this essential transportation service natural monopoly by RATP to a product or service fitting in whatever existent category, the result would be interesting to see, I guess in a 6 months’ time the company would have closed.

You don’t have to pay consultants to realize that if you change the configuration on the pass to start-end whatever day instead of first-last day of the month, or add more people for support at peak days, or get more machines rolling at the same days, or divert the crowd by days within increasing timelines, etc. You just have to do it as you would do it if it was for yourself. Effectiveness unfortunately is still very scarce in public companies and just makes Paris in this aspect definitely not a fast moving forward thinking European capital as others nearby indeed are.

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