Who loses in a corporate boxing match?

Am I the only one who has a fascination with corporate fisticuffs? It can’t be healthy. After all, in effect it’s little more dignified than watching two inebriates lump bales out of each other in a pub car park. Or (worse still) taking your foot off of the gas to gawp at a fender bender. Still, I have watched the SAP-Oracle feud grow from acrimony to animosity and finally to litigation with great interest.

The latest developments see them engaged in a game of 'whose defected customer is bigger'.

But what does all the rough and tumble mean for the customer? It’s tempting to conclude that the customer can only stand to benefit from such a face-off. After all, the battling businesses will create more competitive offerings to attract custom, whilst ramping up their service levels to keep existing clients.

But it doesn’t always work like that. Consider the Virgin Media-BSkyB spat for one moment. What started out as a lesson in keeping customers onside through positive PR and attractive packages has since descended into litigation and recriminations.

All of this is no consolation for those Virgin Media customers who have now been deprived popular programmes including The Simpsons, 24 and Lost for several weeks without a sniff of a customer-wide discount.

Virgin viewers have been left as stranded as the cast from Lost. (This brings me on to another topic altogether: just what the heck is going on in Lost?!?!? I have a theory: the island is in a wormhole in time. The ‘others’ are from a future when mankind can no longer have children. By experimenting on the survivors of the aircrash, they hope to save mankind's future. Well has anybody got a better idea?!)

Elsewhere, advertisers with BSkyB are unhappy that their audience has been cut, and some may demand refunds. And it doesn’t take a genius to work out who could end up bearing the brunt of this cost: the customer. In the meantime, the freeview alternative to Virgin Media and Sky has shown robust growth and has now emerged as the public’s preferred option.

I still fully expect there to be a resolution to the Virgin Media and BSkyB dispute in the coming weeks (after which I’m sure they’ll release a joint statement implying they put aside their differences ‘for the sake of the customer’) but this whole farce demonstrates how reputations can take precedence over customers in corporate dust-ups.

Yet the important thing to the customer remains that they are front and centre of the company’s attention, regardless of what court cases or slanging matches they are involved in.

Ultimately, how the company is faring in a trivial superiority contest is of little concern to them (and Oracle could do worse than read the following relating to this) - although such spats can be an interesting distraction for the rest of us.

Neil Davey, editor

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