According to a new survey by Compete Inc., “93% of respondents said that getting a phone at a reasonable price was either important or very important to them,” while only 65% said the same about being able to switch carriers without buying a new phone.
I can’t find the original research online, but there are several problems with this article. One is math, but I’ll save that for a footnote.
The big problem is a hidden assumption: you can have cheap phones or you can have open access, but you can’t have both, so consumers will choose price. (more…)
This joint paper with Robby Findler introduces blame — from contracts — to a type system with casts. The authors then show that any failure of a cast from a dynamically-typed term to a well-typed context must be blamed on the dynamically typed term (they call this positive blame). Similarly, any cast from a more-precisely-typed term to a less-precisely-typed context must be blamed on the less-precisely-typed context (negative blame). Thus, the title of the talk: well-typed programs can’t be blamed.
The paper concludes with the observation that programming languages with libraries, development tools, user communities and other network effects often get adopted faster regardless of technical superiority. The authors propose that integrating dynamic and static typing into a single language may form a better basis for comparing the strengths and weaknesses of each.
This talk is not just for type theorists and functional programming enthusiasts; many professional programmers work with both static and dynamic types every day. As the authors point out, Visual Basic already supports both static and dynamic typing, and similar integration is planned for Perl 6 and Javascript. One way or another, if you program for a living then you’re probably already switching between the designs, although usually not within a single language.
Several of us from Skydeck will be there on Wednesday and we’d love to see you there. The talk is free, even though it’s being held in the same hotel as the ACM conference. Speaking of the conference, drop us a line if you’ll be in San Francisco for it. Some of us will be attending affiliated events earlier in the week.
Following up on our earlier patch, here is a patch to show backtraces in the OCaml top level and for dynamically-loaded code (this patch subsumes the previous one). This feature is often requested on the OCaml mailing list, and we have found it very useful in development to get a quick idea of where something is breaking.
There’s a lot of interesting articles about the mobile market in this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists, but I have to agree with Judy Breck’s selection for post of the week – an article about an SMS support network for HIV patients in Mexico. It’s more evidence that for many people in the world the mobile phone is their primary means of accessing the Internet.
PDAs are all but extinct, low-end digital cameras are dying off, and mp3 players and even watches are threatened. A lot of people in our industry predicted it; many consumers prefer to carry a ‘Swiss Army’ cell phone instead.
So why are so many people carrying two cell phones?
A new survey by In-Stat reports that about one quarter of the “career age” (age 30-65) cell phone users in the US carry more than one handset, and that this number has grown by over 40% in the past year. That’s more than 20 million people.
Skydeck can confirm this. We asked 1,000 cell phone subscribers* over the age of 18 how many phones they carry, and 14% said two or more. That means 30 million Americans have at least two cell phones.
A blogger made 56 calls to Verizon customer service and asked every rep the same two questions about overage and roaming charges for data. He got twenty-two different answers.
Some people see this as just another example of poor customer service from major corporations, some just laugh at the CSRs for confusing bits with bytes and $0.02 with 0.02¢. But the reps on these calls seem courteous and conscientious, and most people who hear about the 2¢ story need a minute to think about the math.
We see a different problem: cell phone plans are ridiculously complicated.
Rate plans for voice are bad enough. A typical plan has a bucket of anytime minutes, a separate bucket for nights and weekends, a third for in-network calling, an overage rate, special rates for voicemail minutes and calls that don’t get completed, roaming limits for US networks, and a whole other matrix of rates for international dialing and roaming.
Verizon Wireless has announced that by the end of next year consumers will be able to bring any CDMA device to its network, provided it meets some minimal technical requirements, and to run any application on that device. Since Verizon has maintained tighter control over their network and devices than any other US cell phone company – perhaps any cell phone company in the world – my initial reaction was a mixture of shock and delight.
But there is less to this than meets the eye. Verizon has taken an unprecedented step – for Verizon. With respect to open access, Verizon is still several steps behind every other carrier in the US.
Who benefits from today’s announcement?
Affluent consumers who want high-end phones will have more choices. Discussions about open access usually focus on these people, but there aren’t very many of them.
Sprint needs to run a few extra laps, to catch up with the carrier pack. While Skydeck research shows that overall the majority of consumers (68%) are positive about their carrier’s performance, Sprint is consistently lagging behind Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. Here are four supporting examples from our research:
1) General satisfaction: Is my carrier fair and honest? Are bills predictable? Would I recommend them… or switch?
For these questions, Verizon fairs the best, receiving positive feedback from 75% of its customers and negative feedback from only 9%. T-Mobile and AT&T receive negative marks from 12% of their customers, while Sprint’s customers were unsatisfied 19% of the time.
If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday and you have an interest in functional programming languages, come join us at the Bay Area Functional Programmers meeting. David Pollak will be giving a talk on Lift at 7:30pm at the Carnegie Institute on the Stanford campus. Last month’s talk on HAppS was excellent — we’ve integrated a couple of ideas from it into our system at Skydeck. Several of us from Skydeck will be there, so we hope you can make it too.
Skydeck isn’t working with Google. We’ve read the same articles and heard the same rumors that you have. So these are just educated guesses. But everybody else is doing it, so why not us?
Network World reports today that “consumers value customer service and price over open access.”
