Verizon Wireless confirmed that they’re going to stop selling their “Hub” home phone product.
The Hub from Verizon
When the Hub was launched nine months ago, their press release claimed . . .
Only Verizon Wireless can launch a new touch screen home phone system designed to replace old-style home phones with a souped-up home communications system, bridging wireline and wireless connectivity in one simple service, that runs on any broadband connection – whether supplied by Verizon FiOS Internet or DSL or any other high-speed service provider.
Unfortunately, it was a bridge too late.
One of the biggest challenges for any company, especially one in a rapidly-evolving market, is bringing the right product at the right price to the market at the right time via the right channel.
Verizon’s Hub came to late to overcome these three factors:
- Lifestyle trends: Consumers are moving on, replacing landline service with mobile service at a rapid rate, often the result of a move. The cohort behavior is even stronger. Kids get mobile phone and phone number from a young age. Once they leave college, they’re unlikely to even consider landline service. After all, their network of friends has their mobile phone number–their number, really–and isn’t that who their friends are trying to reach, the person, not a phone screwed to a wall in a house?
- Technological trends: Increasingly your mobile phone is more likely to be a smartphone, which means most of the capabilities of the Hub are with you wherever you go, without having to buy yet another device. And your computer is more likely to be a laptop with a wireless connection, giving you some of the functions of the Hub along with convenient data entry and display without additional equipment.
- Consumer behavior: The Hub, a shiny new technology gadget, is most likely to appeal to early adopters, who are just the folks who are dropping their landline and using smartphones. And for the rest, the Hub wasn’t sufficiently compelling to overcome the headaches associated with integrating it into their network and their life.
Verizon is to be commended for killing the product so soon after they launched it.
The current issue of WIRED has a great article on Netflix and the several attempts they made, starting in 2000, to create and launch a movie downloading or streaming service. It’s a story of envisioning the future, leading a group to help create it, and killing or spinning off the effort when they believed that what they were building wasn’t sufficiently compelling.
