Letter to a friend from Jean JeanDevos Devos
My dear friend, “In medio stat virtus” We human beings, we tend to be excessive in everything we are doing and in everything we believe. We tend to switch from one extreme to the other of the pendulum. We tend to kill today what we adored yesterday. We both know people who were yesterday advocating the merits of a regulated world, the benefit for a given country of a single monopolistic telecom operator, and are now the most aggressive competitors, making no difference between sound competition and bloody war! They have quickly moved from one excess to another one. Between the North Pole glaciations and the equatorial jungle, who do not see that the ideal is somewhere in a temperate climate? The deregulation has been like spring after the winter, a nice explosion of life: a lot of green, a lot of opportunities, a lot of
Today we are in a very competitive environment and the economical constraints are prevailing. Fine! But we have now seen what a hyper competition can bring, what are the risks associated with too much pressure on prices and unreasonable delivery dates. When I was a junior manager, my boss used to tell me, “What I expect from a good manager is not its ability to spare money, but instead to spend it properly.“ Some cheap and quick systems are actually very expensive in many aspects. It is now time for the pendulum to come down to its stable position, where the economical value of sound engineering is recognised.
My Dear Friend Septembre 2005
one. The cost was not a real issue, shared between all parties; sufficient time was allocated to the various phases of the projects; but a technical flaw or a late delivery was just unacceptable!
flowers, and a lot of energy. But we have quickly moved from an icy winter into a torrid summer which is not finally more bearable. Let me show you, through real facts, some examples of today’s situation, without forgetting the positives aspects. As you can imagine, my friend, most of the facts hereunder are not publicised for obvious reasons. • A working system was down recently for several months. The cable repair was so difficult to achieve that the owners found themselves without sufficient spare cable. It is now said that this route should not have been selected! • One of the main suppliers in our industry decided recently to leave the contract negotiation table of a significant project. The customer’s requirement was just becoming unreasonable, then unachievable. • Several major installed systems have encountered numerous repeater failures requiring their replacement at a very high cost.
“In medio stat virtus “ Your friend,
Jean Devos Jean Devos Submarcom consulting
Post Scriptum: My friend, it seems that my above remarks could apply to what happened at New Orleans. Jean-Baptiste de Bienville, sometimes called the father of Louisiana, chose to establish the town, between the Mississippi River and the Lake Pontchartrain (Minister of Louis XIV), an area lower than the sea level! Was this a good design? And since then, with the growing knowledge of the hurricanes, was sufficient money invest in those levees, protecting the town? It is now clear that more money in a sound engineering would have save a lot of lives…and money.
In the time when things were fully regulated, the engineering and operational aspects were prevailing over an economical
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