As a rule I shun surveys whether by phone, web or snail mail. Frankly, most are just too boring to contemplate without the incentive of a large carrot - deadpan deliveries of irrelevant questions, crappy ASP programs that crash before the end and letters from researchers who think people have got nothing else to do.

However on Friday, partly motivated by the strange psychology of looming deadlines and partly by sense of obligation to give something back to an interesting blog, I made an exception the Telco2.0 Trends Survey . Unfortunately you’re too late - it closed last week.

I say “unfortunately” because, whatever emerges from the survey - I’m looking forward to the results - the process itself was interesting. For so many questions I found myself explaining why I would probably agree with statements that I had supported and vice versa. Then, towards the end, interviewees were given a set of options and asked to formulate a strategy. The point is that making hard choices is much harder than commentating. Sometimes there are no obvious options - prefabricated strategies are unlikely to yield real competitive advantage. In a previous posting I mentioned von Clausewitz. If strategy is your business, you may want to add this abridged translation by Tiha von Ghyczy, Bolko von Oetinger and Christopher Bassford to your Christmas reading. I just wish my German was good enough to read the original.