MH pal Daniel Taylor of the Mobile Enterprise Alliance made an interesting and eloquent response to Russell’s earlier post on mobile web stats, and we thought it was worth pulling out and highlighting on its own. Daniel’s made some minor changes and kindly allowed us to reprint it as a post. Take it away, Daniel:
In a market dominated by supply-side business models, few parties have a vested interest in acknowledging how fragmented the market is and how slow it’s actually growing. For MDA to publish detailed statistics would force the entire industry to very publicly ask the question of what everyone is doing wrong.
Of course, on the pages of weblogs like this one, we have a very public ongoing debate about the rifts between licensing agreements, data tariffs, technologies and user interfaces.
And the research firms are producing reports outlining actual uptake. Last year, Gartner Group found that 3/4 (or more) of users with Wi-Fi devices don’t actually use Wi-Fi while traveling. Recently, In-Stat found that even though the smartphone sales are increasing, IT departments are unaware that Java applications can run on (lesser) regular mobile telephones, and users still carry a second mobile for voice calls.
Findings like these are both stunning and disappointing, indicating industry-wide failures in product definition and service introduction. We have failed to understand both market and product requirements, and we still don’t understand what users actually want. The reasons for this are myriad, and there is plenty of blame to go around.
I prefer to identify the over-MBA-ification of the business world which applies an ever-reductionist set of analytical models to virtually every decision to the point where every business decision is simultaneously logical, considered, analyzed and meaningless. This abstracted, cool and rational decision making results in a few innovations and a large swath of horribly-misguided products and services. It gives us mobile browsers that don’t work. It gives us soft buttons that keep taking us to services not worth paying for. And it gives us an ongoing love-hate relationship with devices and wireless operators.
From a business IT perspective, mobile data is a disaster, and organizations like MDA are ill-suited to address this topic head on. The reason is simple, membership organizations are designed to serve classes of members, and it takes managerial vision to gain support and develop sufficient budgets to actively involve the so-called “user” community. MDA membership is currently restricted to the vendor community.
I believe strongly in the MDA mission, and I applaud their efforts to date. And yet it is a mistake for MDA management to continue to sweep the disappointing results under the proverbial rug. This topic requires a meaningful and controversial debate about where the market is and what we need to do next. The standard approach of “closing the ranks” most likely keeps the vendors happy and the membership dues incoming. But in today’s electronic online dialogue, we need more than that. We have the ability to talk about “challenges,” “opportunities,” and places for “improvement.” Without pointing fingers, we can address the underlying question of why the market remains fragmented and poorly defined. Failure to do so will continue to quash virtually all legitimacy with the supposed “user” groups the organization purports to encourage and represent.
Excellent write-up by Daniel indeed…
There are a number of factors that have contributed to the “failure” — being the top one that the (mobile) network has been a closed system for way too long. It took the Internet and the Web like 15 years to be what it is today: open, accessible, standard, and service-oriented. I am not surprised it has taken and will take much longer on the mobile side.
The second factor is a result of the first one; because it has been a closed system/network, it has been very hard to introduce to our users innovative ways and methods and products — it is just a pain in the neck and expensive to deploy today.
The third factor is also a result of the first one… owning a handset is expensive and too complicated: data-plans, texting, and handsets that don’t work out of the box.
On the enterprise side, it is a harder problem to crack — not only there is the problem with closed networks, but in addition there is the IT paranoia, and super-heavy processes/procedures to go through to win the account; here handset, application, security and access control management is very important.
It has been a slow process, slow to mature, too slow for many of us who’ve become frustrated after seeing more of the same for the last 8 years; wow, it has been 8 years for me, and we still are in kind of the same boat.
But it is not all bad, we definitely are much better off today than 8 years ago… The networks are opening — we just witnessed 3 making the first move/example. Carriers will finally learn and accept the fact that to realize the vision the network must be decentralized, open, with the flat-rates, and higher-speed networks, and sophisticated handsets, oh, and standards must be adopted. But to tell you the truth, we might be talking here about another 2-5 years.
ceo
The problem I have with all this is that we are looking at a very small pool. At this months MoMo in London Paul Goode from M:Metrics told us that the average balance on a pay as you go phone is less than £4. Now with over 60% of the users on Pay as you go that means that very few of the cutsomers on a network can even afford the reasonable fees of web and walk from t-mobile let alone the charges of Vodafone, Orange and O2.
Looking at the way most use a phone on the tube I have to say that once I have removed the blackberry users, I see people texting and talking some are now listening to music on their phones. I do not see them using phones to surf. Before you shout that its UNDERGROUND, I take the metline which has good network coverage thanks to fact that its mainly overground.
So at present the UK population are not going to consume data as I think that they are very much price sensitive. It has nothing to do with the content it has everything to do with the fact that people preceive data as being very expensive.
On the enterprise side, I see the issue as being one of limited systems integration, Having recently attended the Orange Business Roadshow a number of companies are getting a useful service but it is not marketed with a big fanfare because I think they have an issue of manpower to meet customer demand.
Over the coming months I will be doing work on what does and doesn’t work in terms of mobile services and will post them on my blog. Would say that some of the observations made here are covered in this post, http://ikisai.wordpress.com/2006/11/23/ten-things-follow-up/
DE
[...] Reading what Daniel Taylor said over at Mobhappy, it made me think about how the consumers perceive these data and tone the voice of the companies behind such content down a bit so we can fully understand what’s going on. [...]
[...] Reading what Daniel Taylor said over at Mobhappy, it made me think about how the consumers perceive these data and tone the voice of the companies behind such content down a bit so we can fully understand what’s going on. [...]