2 ms·

It's just unfortunate that many public utilities in the US chose to fight innovation rather using the benefits of their monopoly to embrace the change and try t

It's just unfortunate that many public utilities in the US chose to fight innovation rather using the benefits of their monopoly to embrace the change and try to profit from it and provide better service. What monopoly embraces change? Only companies that are beleaguered embrace change. This even applies to petroleum conglomerates and the now mighty Apple computer. (The latter became overconfident, then faltered, innovated, then innovated to cannibalize itself, now is going through another cycle.) It applied to Microsoft and IBM in days when they seemed eternal and invincible. (Apple was never a monopoly, which is my point!)

kalleboo 10y ago
> What monopoly embraces change? Ones that are well-regulated?[0] Personal experience with this includes the electric utility where I used to live which was proactive in building an open fiber network using their existing conduits, and the effective land-line phone monopoly here which has been at the forefront of wiring everyone with increasingly high-speed fiber when they could just as well have gouged everyone with horrible DSL (there's barely any cable TV here to compete on data). [0] well as in "in a good way", not "very"
- Bluestrike2 10y ago
  It'd be interesting to see some of the risk analysis they did before branching into fiber, particularly for those early cases like Chattanooga. But off the cuff, I'd imagine that there was very little risk to the move outside the capital outlays. By contrast, because renewables are forcing what's effectively a paradigm shift in power markets, it makes sense that monopolies--which by their nature are very risk averse--had trouble embracing major investment into renewables. Perhaps it's better to say that, at least when it comes to the primary activities that constitute their monopoly, monopolies are risk averse and embrace change as little as possible. And renewables are the sort of long-term suicide that scares the hell out of any self-respecting monopoly.

kalleboo 10y ago

> What monopoly embraces change? Ones that are well-regulated?[0] Personal experience with this includes the electric utility where I used to live which was proactive in building an open fiber network using their existing conduits, and the effective land-line phone monopoly here which has been at the forefront of wiring everyone with increasingly high-speed fiber when they could just as well have gouged everyone with horrible DSL (there's barely any cable TV here to compete on data). [0] well as in "in a good way", not "very"

Bluestrike2 10y ago
It'd be interesting to see some of the risk analysis they did before branching into fiber, particularly for those early cases like Chattanooga. But off the cuff, I'd imagine that there was very little risk to the move outside the capital outlays. By contrast, because renewables are forcing what's effectively a paradigm shift in power markets, it makes sense that monopolies--which by their nature are very risk averse--had trouble embracing major investment into renewables. Perhaps it's better to say that, at least when it comes to the primary activities that constitute their monopoly, monopolies are risk averse and embrace change as little as possible. And renewables are the sort of long-term suicide that scares the hell out of any self-respecting monopoly.