How TM Forum specifications can become as effective as industry leading standards
I’ve been involved in industry forums and standard bodies for many years. I’ve had experience in creating industry standards and getting them adopted. I’ve seen many successes and failures of these standardization efforts. It’s never easy to get agreement and even more difficult to get the right standards created and adopted.
Having just come back from Management World Americas in Orlando, the largest OSS/BSS (Operations Support Systems / Business Support systems) event in the industry, it’s gotten me thinking about the standards and frameworks set by TM Forum, and how they might be improved.
The iPhone is now more than 3 years old. I love my iPhone (and my iPad). I’m still on my 3GS, after going through the original iPhone (2G) and the iPhone 3G, and awaiting an opportunity to get the iPhone 4. I seemed to think almost anybody could benefit from an iPhone as their main mobile communication and computing device. So while I understand why all people don’t have one quite YET, it surprises me from time to time when people tell me it’s simply not for them. It’s not that they are waiting for a particular feature – they claim that they will not want an iPhone EVER.
That got me thinking: why are these (otherwise intelligent) people so dead set on NEVER having an iPhone? So I asked them about their reasons. It turns out some of them are due to misunderstanding. They are unaware that the iPhone can do what they want or has a perfectly usable alternative way to do the job. But some reasons are more real and permanent.
So here are the dozen explanations I got for why these people claim they will NEVER have an iPhone (in no particular order), along with whether I see this reason as real or imagined, and why. While it might seem like I invented some of these reasons, I assure you that all of these are actual responses I’ve gotten from people I’ve asked.
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