Keep It Simple, Stupid: Orange’s Partner Camp mantra

Posted by Giles Cottle Monday, December 22nd, 2008

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I’ve just attended Orange’s Partner Camp in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Swapping London’s miserable climes with those of the Sunshine State was an attractive enough proposition, one not even tempered by a nine hour flight full of sugar-addled kids heading to Disney World.

The real reason I made the trip, though, was to check on Orange’s progress in wooing third party talent to add to and improve its suite of applications and services. Through its Orange Partner program, the French incumbent has long tried to shed the operator reputation for being a closed shop by trying to embrace third party talent in all areas of its business.

This was Orange’s eighth Partner Camp, and the company is becoming ever more ambitious in what it looks for from its partners. It wants help in integrating several of its information-based web services – such as directory enquires service 118 712 and city guide CityVox – to offer direct marketing and local advertising. When users searched for a cinema, theatre or restaurant, they could be served relevant local advertising or sent coupons.

Orange also wants to, in its words, “reinvent TV”. On display at Partner Camp was a proptotype for what looked like the ultimate in personalised TV. Users selected an individual personal profile when they turned on their TV, allowing personalisation based on a person and not a household. They could then select content based on time, genre or even the mood they were in. Also included were a number of features more commonly used by your Web 2.0-embracing online retailer of choice: “if you like” style recommendations, user ratings and so on.

But the one word that came up most often throughout the entire event seemed at first contradictory to these grand aims. Perhaps surprisingly for an operator, this word wasn’t convergence, triple-play or multi-screen (although that one did come up several times). It was simplicity, and the concept of keeping it simple ran through the event like the slogan on a piece of Brighton rock

TV, delegates were told, is simple, and should remain simple. The APIs were all about making it more simple for developers to integrate telecoms features into their applications. Yves Tyrode, the head of Orange’s Technocentre, said that the operator would not launch any application that was not simple and easy to use, even if its rivals did so. We were even told that Orange wanted to help make traversing the murky waters of virtual worlds more simple, although firm ideas as to how it planned to accomplish this were not forthcoming.

It’s easy to dismiss such sentiments as cliched, but Orange’s apparent dumb-down strategy is a smart one. The “geek market”, as one staffer put it, will always be a hard one for any incumbent to crack. They have grown up with the web, are heavy users of it and are unlikely to be impressed with any Johnny-come-lately offers coming from an operator.

Telcos seem to be under pressure to try and compete with many of these firms, but in many ways, they shouldn’t do. Incumbents are not agile and fast-moving companies, largely because they do not have an agile or fast-moving customer base. They are as mainstream and mass market as they come. Most people use their mobile phones for SMS and voice but do not then have a third favorite application. The real opportunity for operators is to make such applications more accessible, approachable and – that word again – simple for its core audience.

In doing this, they can not only increase the range of services they offer, but also increase the usage of their pipes. Tyrode claimed that 10% of Orange’s mobile customers used 90% of its mobile internet bandwidth, and that it wanted to turn the other 90% of its customers into mobile web evangelists. Attempting to turn the 80/20 rule on its head like this is a more viable strategy for an operator than attempting to compete head on with the more innovative and agile internet players.