Telia Company’s head of innovation, Rickard Damm, has published an open letter on LinkedIn, voicing his concerns about the state of affairs at Ericsson. The letter to incoming CEO Borje Ekholm said Ericsson should return to focusing on product development instead of services.
Damm worked at Ericsson for ten years and is now one of its customers. In his letter, which included a couple of profanities, one of them scatological, he said Ericsson used to be vibrant and its customers were eager to "jump on to the next wave". The company should listen to its research and development team more, to boost product management, he says.
Damm says services are not the future of anything, as all other professional service firms do what Ericsson does, only better and cheaper. There is promise in the cloud but Ericsson should not "get lost in geektown", without clarifying what this meant. He said Ericsson should focus on operators’ desire for new revenue streams instead of simply on cutting costs at data centres. Innovation and technology leadership should be emphasised.
Telia also says Ericsson should concentrate on attaining market share in 5G, which he calls the last major telecom opportunity of this generation.
Damm went on to say that the telecoms segment is the only significant and advanced tech sector that is shrinking year-on-year, and is not an attractive career option. Ericsson ought to foster engineering talent.
Ericsson CMO and CCO Helena Norrman responded on the professional networking site by saying she would make contact with Damm personally in order to continue the discussion. She would also share his posting with relevant people in its leadership team.
