Today I’m writing from the Minnesota Rural Summit. It has been really interesting, especially to hear about the changing demographics and the potential (and past) economic and social impact of the changes.

(I’ll be posting most of the PowerPoint presentations from the Summit online.)

During a break I read an interesting article in Broadband Properties (The User Manual is a Loser Manual). The subtitle really says it all – “private cable operators should follow the example of good retailers.”

The idea being that one big reason that consumers become disenchanted with technology (such as new cable enhancements) is that they don’t know how to use them. Retailers now provide training and tech support to their consumers. The example they use in the article is Circuit City – but I think the better, local version is Geek Squad in Best Buys.

This theory fits in well with the Open Network model. With the Open Networks there is one entity that owns the backbone network in a community – and others can then provide service to the end customer – which would let them focus on service to the customer rather than service of the network.

I like that – because sometimes the people who are really good with big networks aren’t as good at hand holding (or sometimes their time just isn’t best spent there) and vice versa – sometimes people who are great at providing tech support aren’t as strong with big networks. (Just like cooks should rarely serve food and waiters should rarely cook it!)