Danish kingdom of Scartela

The respected telecom analyst pervert-tanuki.livejournal.com , hiding his true face and name (although there is evidence that this is a certain Tele2 employee), prompted me to share with you, dear% username% quotes from Igor Pichugin's blog (http : //igor-pichugin.livejournal.com), who once worked for Yota.

For marketing and PR, the result of the restructuring was the dismissal of half of the people from these units. One Dominic from the London agency that developed the entire corporate identity of Yota did this execution. The Englishman for some time suddenly became for Denis the most authoritative marketing guru (although in fact he is a designer). In March, the British began to develop a new marketing concept for Yota. However, no conceptual activities have yet been observed; probably the english concept was not too good.

The hired agency Apostol Media was engaged in PR work. Recently appeared and specializing in Internet promotion, it “distinguished itself” in February, when the “apostles” were given the opportunity, experimentally, to do something on the Internet for Yota. They began to post on forums and blogs of the so-called Yota-bots with an unobtrusive mention of the company name. But some blogger with a thousandth of this business cut through and wrote a post about the fact that Yota is engaged in spamming. His post was in the top 10, had a resonance, and the company then had to make efforts to hush up the scandal.

About the agency Apostle and Scartel, I had the imprudence to argue not so long ago on the expanses of my beloved habr. Friends, what can we say about the PR agency, which, in addition to twitter with one tweet, has a corporate website , which is an empty (!) Blog on the word-press platform?

By this time, a new marketing director had appeared in the Yota Moscow office. He was recruited from VimpelCom, where he was engaged in advertising and, of course, had nothing to do with PR. Not surprisingly, in preparation for the summer announcement of Yota, the guys again managed to screw up.

We are talking about Vladimir Dobrynin. Unfortunately, I know almost nothing about him. Therefore, I will quote pervert-tanuki: " Mr. Dobrynin, widely known in narrow circles, was one of the participants in the nomadic marketing circus Popov-Yeremichev-Dobrynin, whose tour along the MCC-SonicDuo-Beeline route became a byword, though the last stage of the route was as they say, for some members of the troupe forced . "

It turns out that everything is simple: the Apostol Media agency is owned by Tina Kandelaki (she talks about him on her blog). And Tina is friends with Mr. Adonyev, one of the investors and shareholders of Yota. Recently, a journalist wrote on his blog that Yota pays the Apostle 4 million rubles a month.

Under this business, the company begins to grow at the extraordinary pace of StarLab, an R&D division. At the same time, the crisis is at the height of the crisis, and all companies, on the contrary, are cutting staff. Starlab is led by Sasha Shtuchkin, a computer genius and winner of the Olympics. He is only 23 years old, and under his command at some point there are at least 250 people. Denis, who is only 31 years old, is very proud of the youth of his team (CEO of Starlab, in particular) and often emphasizes this in an interview. For Starlab, young computer geniuses, sometimes even schoolchildren, are recruited like Sasha. They treat their director without much reverence and immediately dispute almost all of his judgments.

When Yota switched to commercial operation of the network, a “personal account” written by young people caused the “horror of the end of the month” that almost all Yota users have faced more than once. At the end of the month, everyone came to the site to replenish their account, and the “personal account” stopped working due to overload, so much so that Starlab residents could not find the cause of the failure for several days.

My envious ego would like me to lead a team of 250 people at age 23. However, my mind tells me that managing such a unit at age 23 is almost impossible. It's not about knowledge. The point is experience. A brilliant inexperienced programmer can not cope with a crowd of students and schoolchildren who do not even understand what work is. For them it is fun. Plus pocket expenses.

In fact, product marketers could not properly calculate the business model for mobile IP-telephony, and then still decided that it was unprofitable. And the techies said that there was simply no place for the voice on the network, which was already heavily overloaded with data.

It’s not even interesting who invented this creatiff, but why this layout was approved. Why none of those approving saw this ambiguity. Usually such things are approved or not approved by Denis Sverdlov. This is his holy right: the right and left hands of the general director usually say: "The main thing is that Denis likes it." He expresses his opinion succinctly: “I like” or “I don't like” (the author’s spelling is preserved). I could not find any system in this “like / dislike” it.

It is only clear that Denis likes Apple and Steve Jobs and he tries to be like him. Whoever saw him presenting the HTC MAX 4G in the House of Music would agree with me. The problem is that Denis is by no means the most important appraiser of ideas in the company and his “likes” can easily change to “dislike” under the influence of shareholder Sergei Adonyev, who is actively involved in operational management.

Denis constantly emphasized what youth, creative, highly professional team he has. But professionalism in the company for some reason is not in honor, his number is definitely not the first. This was what struck me the most - in such a high-tech business. Nevertheless, the company has developed some kind of distorted system of values. For example, a great deal of indignation is made by numerous family and friendship ties. Two vice presidents are husband and wife, two more are brother and sister. The first regional network appeared in Ufa - because there it was necessary to take the case of a relative of the wife of Denis. At high positions in the company there are many classmates and classmates of Denis, former associates of Corus Consulting (Denis is a co-owner there).

What can I say if Denis’s father, as I heard, is an old friend of Mr. Adonyev.

All this from the outside resembles how Peter the Great played with his "amusing troops" from real people in childhood. Only in the case of Peter did we receive the Emperor of All Russia. Now Sverdlov and Shtuchkin are playing "build a telecom operator." Moreover, negligent children who did not fit Sverdlov with their game are easily driven out of the sandbox.
I don’t even want to talk about family ties.

Original article pervert-tanuki.livejournal.com/165407.html

upd: For information. Igor Pichugin worked for many years at Kommersant. One of the best telecom journalists . "At one time, I dragged [on myself] the i-One project."