Well, it’s that time of the year again, when people who should know better put their reputations on the line and start making damn fool predictions for the coming year.
Before I do that though, how did I do last year? Not bad actually, with a couple of wrong ‘uns thrown in. I am human! Here’s the full text, with a summary below.
1. 3 fails to make 1,000,000 subscribers (again)
Hmmm. Well I was certainly wrong about this, they easily surpassed the magic million and are the fastest growing UK operator.
BUT, they’ve done this by abandoning their previous strategy of which I was so critical. So I was kind of right in that if they hadn’t slashed their prices across the board, they’d never have made the million.
Any damn fool can sell a $10 note for $5 though. So this is a short term measure at best.
But they are finally starting to launch some innovative services, which is the key to growing 3G, so there’s life in 3 yet.
2. MMS still not going to work
Well, full marks here, Mr Buckley, despite millions invested in marketing.
I’ve written about MMS’s problems before.
As I wrote last year:
the fact is that even if you: ∑ Ignore the technical complexity of setting up your phone ∑ Ignore the complexity of sending an MMS. ∑ Ignore the interoperability. ∑ Ignore pricing (35p ń get outta hereÖ). You still have problem with what to put in your MMS - sometimes called content around these parts.
If itís going to go mass market, people will need help in composing these things and that means a range of cheap and readily available, easy-to-use content. And that content will need to sit on their phones and be able to be previewed so that they know what theyíre sending their nearest and dearest.
This is all just as valid today as it was last year. As Frank Koehntopp wrote today:
I took my 3 year old to McDonalds today, and the Coke cup had a code for a “The Incredibles Mobile Special” - which is something like a ring tone, a background picture or a game for your phone.
To get it, you have to send the 8 digit code + your phone model as an SMS to a certain number, and you’ll receive the content in return.
I did just that, and in came a two part SMS which appeared as “service message”. Would you know what to do with it? Do you have any idea about the costs of clicking on that link? I bet you don’t, nor will the kids who try that. In my case, it didn’t even work (some strange server error), and I had to chose between different GPRS access points.
If this happened in other industries, the whole management team would be kicked out on its ear.
And I’ll repeat my mantra: Why can’t the industry make phones that work out of the box? It’s a scandal.
If you work for an operator, it is a genuine question. Why? Please leave a comment.
3. SMS continues to thrive
Round of applause.
4. Local Free Messaging starts to take off.
Well that’s true too. It’s also much bigger than you might think. Watch this space for more growth.
5. Java Takes Off (and not just for gaming).
Yep. And remember all those announcements of media giants creating their own java portals for non-gaming content - what happened to them actually??? Has any actually launched.
6. DRM Rises up the agenda
DRM continues to dominate the conversation and will continue to do so.
However, it’s pretty obvious these days that all DRM is doomed and content owners need to live with that and adjust their business models accordingly.
Every time a foolproof DRM system is launched someone cracks it within 24 hours and tells those that want to know all about it. Some of these fools can be darn clever 
7. LBS starts to happen
Yep. Still grass roots, but beginning to move from tech provider “sell” to user “buy”, which is a great sign. Projects like Dodgeball and Yellow Arrow are pretty exciting.
8. TagText launches to great success
This is one my personal projects and sadly we were badly let down by our development partners. I hope 2005 will be our year!
So I’ll give myself 6.5 out of a possible 8 marks (half for the 3 one). Ironically the one that I got completely wrong was the one I was in a position to directly influence 
The trouble with this kind of exercise though is that you can’t remember if these were bleedingly obvious when I made them. Well, actually I don’t think they were that obvious and certainly Local Free Messaging is still not on most commentator’s map and MMS was predicted to boom.
Anyway, next I need to think about the coming year. Make your prediction by leaving a comment below or drop me an email russell at mobhappy dot com. I’m off to rub my crystal ball.
re: 2 MMS - your Mcdonalds application is delivered via WAP push, not MMS.
“If you work for an operator, it is a genuine question. Why? Please leave a comment.”
If you buy a phone from an operators shop, it will work out of the box. If you buy it from carphone warehouse, or phones4u, they buy direct from the manufacturer, so they don’t have operator specific settings on them.
You don’t deserve a point for 1, and you haven’t backed your case for points for 4,6 or 7.
WAP push? MMS? WHY DO I HAVE TO CARE??? It’s a mobile phone - I’m not a brain surgeon. Sorry for shouting, but this makes me so mad. Not only are the settings too complicated (why not put them on teh SIM???), the apps are also to stupid to work properly with them. How am I supposed when to use the WAP APN, when the internet APN, or even the MMS one? Why are there even different ones - it’s not that this would be a technical necessity…
Yep Frank - absolutely, me old mucker.
I don’t generally respond to anonymous comments, but Mr Vodafone above (that’s his IP address anyway) has just rather demonstrated the whole point - users simply want phones that work.
I haven’t seen the McD’s promotion, I was just reporting someone else’s impression. If a user says MMS is too complicated, he’s right - even if he’s talking about Wap Push!
And, yes, I do understand the channel of distribution and how phones are sold in the UK. But:
1. Phones purchased direct *don’t* work out of the box. I know that from several personal harrowing experiences with O2.
2. CPW and the like have just as much vested interest as operators in getting MMS to work. Work with them - they’re still selling your product.
3. Again, users don’t give a shit about why their phones have the wrong settings. So what can operators and retailers do to solve this stupidity?
If I buy a car, I don’t expect to re-tune it before driving it on the motorway. I assume it’s OK for motorway use if it works on an A road. And I don’t expect the manufacturer and dealer to shrug their shoulders and blame someone else when this happens.
As for the other points, I don’t really think they need more explaining actually. I’ve covered them off in my blog on many occasions.
- Local free messaging (commonly known as Bluejacking) is a fact and a large part of youth culture currently. Can I prove it? No, coz there’s no way the industry has of tracking it.
But look at what the kids are doing.
- DRM hacking. Look at what’s happening in P2P. Look what happened on with Nokia’s N-Gage games - they were cracked and on the net for anyone to use within a week. Look at the frankly ridiculous efforts of the MPAA as they try to stuff the cat back in the bag.
Besides which, I only said it was going up the agenda!
Finally, LBS. I said it would really start to happen. And it has. I quoted two examples. Add that to child tracking (despite the fact that I don’t think this works as a model)initiatives, navigation and asset tracking and you have a multi million dollar business already.
Now the challenge for Vodafone and other operators is to move LBS up your own corporate priority so that innovation can start to thrive in the developer community. Operators are in danger of strangling this baby at birth by not deploying the technology the industry needs.
John Vodafone, what are your predictions for 2005? I appreciate you might have to remain under cover with a fake email address, but that’s fine in this instance.
Russell
Russell
“If I buy a car, I don’t expect to re-tune it before driving it on the motorway. I assume it’s OK for motorway use if it works on an A road. And I don’t expect the manufacturer and dealer to shrug their shoulders and blame someone else when this happens.”
Funnily enough, I bought a new car once, and after driving it away from the dealership I found something obvious on it didn’t work properly. I phoned up the manufacturer to complain and they were insistant that it was the dealer’s responsibility to ensure the car was in proper working order when it left the forecourt, not theirs when it left the factory….
Do carphone4U have an interest in ensuring the phones they sell are configured correctly? Or would they rather their staff spent the time selling more phones to other people, and leaving post-sale device config to the networks? How many main car dealers sell their cars with a full tank of petrol - its the same thing and its all about reducing the cost of sale.
MMS or WAP push - does it matter? Depends if you are publishing blogs saying “mms sucks incredibly”, when you are actually describing something else. It also matters because marketing brand people might read all these headlines and think “hey, mms sucks, we should use wap-push, you never hear anything bad about that”
And it matters because as you say Frank, what’s the cost of downloading an wap-push message? MMS is free to receive.
Oh, and 1 prediction, just for fun.
Premium rate video calling will be huge. HUGE.
OK John, so the car industry sucks too
Although the three cars I’ve bought in the last three years from dealers (one new and 2 nearly new) all had full tanks of petrol, as it happens.
Your prediction. Yep, I think you might be right. Providing the right content is made available at a reasonable price.
And I think that there’s a lot more to brand marketers holding back from MMS than perception of quality. Price is certainly an issue too. But more importantly they’re innately conservative and their advisers, the agencies, even more so.
I sometimes despair that the mobile marketing industry will never get past Text and Win. This is just a fulfilment mechanism, hardly worthy of being called mobile marketing.
Russell
See, it’s not just me gratuitously slagging off MMS.
Carlo at The Feature is saying the same thing. http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101313&ref=4879267
Admittedly, that doesn’t necessarily make us right. But it does mkae our viewpoint at least worth considering.
After all, the other way hasn’t worked.
Russell
OK, my prediction for 2005 (well, more of a wish actually, ‘cos I’ll be surprised if this is done right… if at all in 2005) is that so-called “virtual keyboards” (http://psynixis.blogdrive.com/archive/3.html
) will become fully integrated into some mobile phones.
Simon
I do agree with you.