(keitai-l) Re: Business Model

Hi,

I have a few reflections on this week's debate on the driving forces
of mobile internet.

> > 
> > This seems to be the general problem in the Mobile Market. There
> > seems to be NO solid business model yet !
> 
> WAP, which was always advertised as something solid and 
> useful (or what
> marketing experts think what people think what was useful: banking,
> downloading stock exchange data, banking, downloading stock exchange
> data, banking, downloading stock exchange data, etc, etc), 

I do think that it makes sense in a country like my own, Sweden, to 
sell WAP phones with business/utility orientated arguments.

Sweden is very different from Japan: Most people here don't have 
much money to spend after paying the world's highest taxes, and our 
Lutheran culture teaches us to regard pleasure and amusements as
shameful. 

Of course people want to have fun, but they have to convince their
conscience--or their boss--that they really need that WAP phone!

The boss will definitely not be convinced by arguments like:

  "I could download pictures of Hello Kitty and Tare Panda if you 
   buy me one of those phones" or

  "I could check my horoscope anytime" ;-)

A similar thing happened in the early 1980s when computers like Commodore 64
and Atari came. The sales people were saying things like, "You can use this 
computer to organize your record collection," but all people ended up doing 
was playing games!

Same thing when the VCRs arrived, "You can use this to tape TV programs you
miss when you're not home"
 
Then people ended up renting porno movies or The Chainsaw Massacre ... (or both)

I'm convinced they would have initially sold few C-64s and few VCRs if they 
had told people, "You will use this thing for pure mindless entertainment 
only". People just wouldn't want to spend their hard earned, hard taxed
money on something frivolous.

But now, when owning a computer and/or a VCR is commonplace,
people don't need an explicit reason to buy one.

I don't know how much this kind of "self deception" is typically Swedish.
Maybe other northern European countries are similar to a certain degree ...


Joran

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Joran Roslund, PhD
Ericsson Microwave Systems
PDC and W-CDMA Systems

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