The wired world - vision circa 2000

I happened to come across an article from 11 years ago about a company I worked for back then, Marconi. It my second attempt at pushing forward my vision for an "Intelligent City".

Tom Golway

These two clips from Economist article captured what we thought would be the catalyst that would provide the fuel to "boil the ocean".

In the end, it was just trying to boil the ocean. Within 6 months just about all of us who worked on the vision (including John Mayo) were collecting unemployment checks.

Comments and thoughts are always welcome.

Amplify’d from www.economist.com

Reinventing Marconi

Lord Simpson’s model, here, is Mr Welch, who built the world’s most successful company by focusing not on his products, but on his customers. Rather than trying to sell them more hardware, he developed new services to flog to them. Lord Simpson, similarly, reckons that the value in Marconi’s hardware businesses lies in its customers. Its vending machines and petrol pump businesses, for instance, mean that it has relationships with customers such as Coca-Cola, BP and Exxon. That is an attractive customer base if Marconi can find ways of adding to what these companies buy.

Communications technology offers a way of doing that. Marconi has signed a deal with Coca-Cola which will put the 8.5m vending machines in its biggest global markets online. The company will know when a machine has run out or broken down, when demand is greatest or least and when machines need stocking. Similar developments are under way in petrol retailing in America, where the electronics recognise the car and debit its owner’s bank or credit card account (too bad if the car is stolen). If it all works, Marconi will turn a collection of boring product businesses into new online services. Read more at www.economist.com