Mobile content executives not eating their own sausages

This comment piece on Techdirt flashed across my radar this morning.

Link: Techdirt: What Does It Mean When Most Mobile Content Execs Don’t Use Their Own Services?

What Does It Mean When Most Mobile Content Execs Don’t Use Their Own Services?

It’s a commentary relating to a recent survey that apparently found a huge proportion of mobile content compay executives don’t actually use their own services.

Now, you obviously get some people working in companies who don’t ‘use’ the products and services they produce. For example, a chap who makes prosthetic limbs probably doesn’t have much call to use his own products. However if you’re the Chief Exec — or anywhere near any position of responsibility — of something like Yahoo! Mobile, I expect to see you using it.

Further, I expect to see you living it and evangelising it. It really does wind me up when I meet people who are in positions of responsibility in the mobile industry — and who don’t use their products and services at all. I often feel like grabbing their jobs off them and giving them to someone who actually cares. Luckily that’s rarely ever within my gift.

There are exceptions of course. But this is often why I ask people what handset they use. You have to start worrying when the person describing their uber-new-and-wicked push-the-boundaries mobile service pulls out an old battered Nokia that’s capable of no more than texting. I start grinding my teeth when the person then explains that they ‘only use their phone for calls’.

If the person selling it ain’t enjoying it, or even using it, why should anyone else….