I'm a Vodafone, hear me purr

<disclamer> Any good financial advisor has to be rich. I'm not, If you're willing to take financial advices from a guy that spends way too much time around computers, then you're a fool.
But, there may be something interesting here so, by all means, keep on reading </disclamer>

I have a pretty good experience with 2 out of 3 of the communications providers in Portugal. Portugal Telecom (PT), now something close to being my employer (sort of but, let's try to keep this posts comparisons with War and Piece to a minimum please) and Vodafone to whom I am now (only) a customer with most of my communication related services being provided by them.

A couple of days ago, I was thinking about this post and I planned on saying that, if you're into buying stocks, Vodafone was going to be the big name on the list. I seriously don't believe PT to be able to keep any significant market share in the upcoming months or years. Now, I'm not so sure but, let's get back to that later (hopefully tomorrow).

Telecom companies need their IT. It's not a critical part of their business, it IS their business. It's no wonder that one the the most successful, bright and competent high level managers from PT is, at his core, a tech guy. This guy came up with several pretty cool ideas (in Portugal at least) like the filters for those annoying horns in Football matches, and a personal channel for each subscriber of PT's TV service and, he is (arguably) one of the biggest reasons for PT's market share in the TV market.

One would expect that, with such a cool example, the board of this company would try to build on that, well, what they did was slightly different.

PT is now on the end stages of a process where all it's outsourcers (namely, mostly everybody that works there) are now being forced into changing companies or being fired. That's a pretty bad situation as it is but, the new companies are presenting salaries of 800 euros to the people who move there, that includes all the work to be done in off hours (some restrictions probably apply) and 1 week per month of 24h / day in standby.

If you're wondering how high or low are salaries in Portugal, a call center operator that knows 1 foreign language can expect to get 700+ euros per month, have some skills in word or excel and that starts adding.

If anyone is reading this as a blame assignment, I have absolutely no idea if the high level management of that company even knows what's happening. I do believe that a process customer initiated to limit the number of suppliers (basically creating a monopoly) is a bad idea for the customer but, if they have any idea about what they're getting themselves into, well, your guess is as good as mine.

What it's clear to see is that when the vast majority of your IT staff is about to leave, then, you're going into some deep problems.

I guess it's obvious that the biggest IT employer in the country would try to take advantage of the crisis, that's natural but, when he positions himself at the same level of employer has a supermarket teller, that's more than pushing the bright people out, he his putting his critical systems in the hands of people who are willing to do an harder job than serving coffees for less money (McDonald's rejects?)

It is my firm belief that innovation inside PT is about to stop. So is the majority of their systems.