Disservice to the Industry

align="right" width="127" height="179" hspace="4" vspace="4">Disservice to the Industry

"Hide and seek" will

make an apt description of our Communication Industry. The industry that does not want to

share information with the media, but is only interested in getting information out of it.

This is a lesson we keep learning year after year at the time of our annual industry

survey, V&D 100.

This practice of keeping the

company information in shrouds reflects very poorly on the companies. Hiding information

also takes the mask off a lot of those media savvy companies which spare no opportunity to

grab limelight but become untraceable when it comes to giving basic information.

While the detailed analysis in

our annual issue will talk of markets and industry figures, what is more critical, but has

not been covered in the survey, relates to the attitude and ethics of most of the

companies. It reveals how disorganized most of the vendors are. The questionnaires they

send back to us are shabbily filled with incorrect, incomplete, and inconsistent data.

These questionnaires show no semblance of professionalism. A client of any of such vendors

must see them to believe. This also discloses that most of these companies do not know how

to put across their strengths. Instead they hide their weaknesses. Every company has its

own areas of core competence, sharing which will help not only them, but also the users in

understanding the companies better. This tendency to conceal information also indicates

that the vendors are insecure, and do not feel that the Indian market is big enough to

accommodate a lot of players.

What the industry players do not

seem to realize is that they are hurting their own cause by not sharing. There is a dearth

of organized information—which is possible only through annual surveys like V&D100—in

the Communication Industry. Nobody seems to have a clear idea of any of the market sizes.

Hiding information is nothing but a disservice to the industry. A case in point, according

to observers, is the wrong cellular market projections that contributed to the fiasco

everybody is witnessing today.

And finally, the user’s right to know. The

user invests money on products and technologies, which he feels, will give him benefits

and advantages. Won’t his life become simpler if he can find comprehensive and

balanced information at one place? It is important that the industry ponders over these

points and thinks long term and big. Hiding information in this era of openness will not

help it at all.