Following Russell’s earlier post about stats on mobile web usage, this story caught my eye yesterday:
AFP - Text messaging still king in mobile phone world
Text messaging remains the most dominant mode of mobile data communication, as high costs and cumbersome procedures keep customers from fully embracing fancier applications, industry players say.
As revenue from voice service narrows, mobile operators are hard pressed to find a key new application that will continue generating cash like the simple yet still popular short messaging system (SMS), also known as text messaging.
There’s not much else in the story, really, which focuses on efforts to add features to SMS like sound effects — an attempt to ride a popular service as far as possible by adding superfluous extras to it, instead of removing the roadblocks to innovation elsewhere in the ecosystem. Check out that first sentence again:
“Text messaging remains the most dominant mode of mobile data communication, as high costs and cumbersome procedures keep customers from fully embracing fancier applications, industry players say. ”
There’s a lesson in there, somewhere. If only we could find it…
Right on Carlo
“Right on Carlo”
Hmm. Carlo didn’t express any opinion. Irony?
Pricing for data is of course virtual, so that’s easily solved. Operators might not want data to cannibalize voice air time, but that’s another story.
The user experience is a bit harder though.
I still see phones being delivered from branded shops that don’t have everything activated. I don’t understand the rationale in that.
To get users onto the mobile web is of course not just about configuration. Service access needs to be much more in the face and transparent. There has been talks about using the idle screen as a portal for a long time, still I see very little of that except on smartphones and then typically for local phone functions like PIM and other apps.
Also the attitude of operators need to change from “deliver consumer services” to “deliver B2B services to service providers”. Of course on the voice side they own the customer, and that seems to be the mindset also on the service-side, which is wrong.
Weird. I would consider high cost and cumbersome to be good descriptions of SMS.
While it may be cumbersome, its universal. The US now does 12.7 Billion SMS per month and Europe is doing 4x that. It’s a $3B business in the US alone today and $10B in
a couple of years. Say what you like…..it’s good business and you can express yourself in sms in ways that you could not in voice or even email. i think forcing people to 160 characters does have some benefits!
Tom - you’re showing your age
Seriously, look at the way a kid uses sms and “cumbersome” just isn’t an accurate description. Now if you see me using it, it’s spot on, I agree.
Russell
Me thinks SMS remains the most dominant form of mobile data communication cos everyone has got it. We’ve still got a wee while to go until data-plans, j2me, syncml and other innovation ingredients are ubiquitous across the device base. Then…the mobile innovation wave will really hit us!