Hello Juergen and others,
I agree with most of what Juergen has said. I also think Juergen and
others like him deserve a lot of credit for creating successful mobile
internet business in japan (of which I have not done). I also would like to
apologize for posting an incorrect example (virgin airlines) - of
nevertheless what I believe to be a correct phenomena. This is where I
differ with Juergen's opinion. It is the very success of Docomo's i-mode
system that has caused us to look at it very closely at i-mode. while
docomo did not claim that "i-mode is the internet in your pocket," i-mode
willl become that and I take my hat off to docomo for this.
the internet is the most important technological development of our time
and Docomo has shown the world how the mobile internet can be an important
part of the overall Internet. In some ways Docomo has succeeded too much and
thus it may have too much power. this is not to say that docomo is bad; if
the rest of Japan's traditional companies (e.g., banks) had reformed
themselves the way docomo has done, there would be no recession or banking
crisis in japan. It is too say that no one firm should be able to say who
can participate in the mobile internet and further, why should docomo want
to do this? Juergen is right. docomo is too busy to evaluate the 400
submissions it receives every day. docomo should began transferring this
work to other firms so that it can concentrate on other things (like 3G) and
to enable a restructuring of the official menu to occur. this probably
sounds like a mouthful but if docomo were to begin allowing its official
providers to create linkages and portal sites and if it were to create a
specific category on its official menu for these portal sites and search
engines, other firms could do the screening for docomo. I believe users
would eventually get a better service and docomo would get more traffic, the
latter of which is very good for docomo.
I apologize for the long message. it is the nature of my field.
Jeff Funk
Kobe University
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Wed May 9 05:00:02 2001