Verizon CIO Taking It To Vendors
from the save-more,-save-more dept
Chris writes "This is scary if your business is based on selling to large corporations. Verizon is really squeezing its vendors. I'm sure the others are doing the same thing - or will soon." The WSJ article is a profile of Verizon's CIO and his intense focus on squeezing their technology vendors as much as possible. It talks about how he relies on eBay as a "stock market for servers" and tells his staff to make sure they get lower prices than what's available on eBay. Basically, he's driving down prices by relying on open information. The more information you have as a buyer, the better position you're in - and Verizon seems to be doing that to an extreme point. The one thing that I wonder about, though, when a company is so focused on "cutting costs" is that they begin to forget about the other side of the equation: the benefits that those costs were supposed to bring. You can cut all your costs if you shut down the company, but the reason you're in business is because you think you can take the assets you have and create a bigger return. So, when a company is entirely focused on cutting costs, they often end up cutting too deep, and losing out on the ability to make a bigger return for their shareholders.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Verizon computer systems are terrible - no reason
The technicians do not have cell phones. They use outdated black and white screen technology and have to ask their customers for permission to connect the terminal to log their orders and find out what they are doing next.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]