Provoking Strategic - Out of the Box - Thinking

The COOK Report is a monthly newsletter for those willing to struggle with the future. Given the vast amount of information available for “free” on the Internet, it is clear that a newsletter that demands a hefty subscription fee must be unique. Consequently, The COOK Report does not present the capsulized wisdom found for free on myriads of web sites. Instead The COOK Report crosses boundaries - a task that is necessary in order to gain an understanding of the complexities of the telecom markets in the time of major change. Changes in technology produce changes in associated market and economics. Changes in policy may, or may not, follow.

The COOK Report is also not standard market research. Readers will not find crystal ball prognostications regarding the market for a “hot” new product in the next quarter. While The COOK Report is the product of a single person’s work, in the past year it has been heavily focused on incorporating the results of a group effort where more than 50 leading industry experts have gathered in a private, moderated mail list discussing, in a broad sense, the economics of global telecom and IT.

Every month, as editor-publisher, I do at least one and usually two interviews that range in length from five to ten thousand words. The interviewees usually agree to join the mail list. The interview itself is fed back to the mail list for discussion with the person’s peers. List members can bring up new topics and, with the knowledge of all that the conversation is on record and vetted in front of an audience of peers, the resulting discussion is exceptional in its quality. List members range from company founders and CEOs, to CTOs and lead engineers. Also represented is a cross section of telecom attorneys, financial analysts and VCs, and individual entrepreneurs.

The results of this discussion are published as a monthly ongoing ‘symposium’ that averages 30,000 words a month. Readers gain the advantage of my interviews, and my analysis but even more important they gain a window into the interaction of key and identifiable industry players who themselves evaluate what is being said by their colleagues. The result has been likened (for a baseball fan) to being a "fly-on-the-wall" in the Yankee’s locker room.

For large enterprise subscribers its coverage is oriented towards long-term strategy planners and chief technical officers. Smaller organizations will benefit as their management is afforded a glimpse of where the industry is headed 6 months to a year or longer in the future. Finally The COOK Report offers an opportunity for investors and planners to due diligence on the more narrow range of standard commercial industry market research that may have too much interest in supporting the latest technology hype.

The COOK Report on the Internet Protocol: Technology, Economics and Policy will continue to report on the business cases made possible by the on going shift in the three tectonic plates of IP. The COOK Report has been published since April 1992. Having no advertisments, the Report is 100% subscriber funded. Long interviews (5,000 to 15,000 words) and Symposium Discussion by industry leaders on these issues are our hallmark. More than 50 site licenses that include the largest corporations in the industry make the COOK Report available to every employee. Now in our 14th year of publication we offer the only independent publication focused on these issues.

The COOK Report is

what readers turn to for a depth of coverage unavailable in the "trade press." It provides a roadmap for wrestling with change.