James Governor concludes
> Let's not forget why Yahoo became so successful. It helped us make sense
of
> something chaotic.
Perhaps more to the point: Let's not forget why AOL is doing
better than Yahoo in this turbulent dot-com deflation. Early on,
AOL provided a fully packaged customer experience of networking
to the average American (well, OK, the average *fully-literate*
American) - a service good enough to justify a modest charge
against a credit card.
I'll say it again: "A service good enough to justify a modest
charge against a credit card. Early on."
Time + quality + trust = money.
DoCoMo does much the same, but gets around the automatic
credit-card-debit obstacle (credit cards being rarer in Japan)
by sending phone bills and doing bank withdrawals instead.
The important point being that, with "NTT" as its family name,
DoCoMo instantly had as much brand power - and trust - as
Visa or Mastercard in the West. And it had the plastic to go
with it: the phones.
In a funny way, AOL piggybacked off "m-commerce" before
that word existed. After all, credit cards, by virtue of their
magnetic stripes, were early "mobile digital electronic devices"
(albeit rather passive ones), networked through the card-readers
in restaurants, rental-car desks, hotels, etc., by nation-spanning
public data utilities like Tymnet and Telenet.
(I did a brief stint at Tymnet in the late 80's, and was
astonished to learn that literally billions of dollars of day-after-
thanksgiving Christmas shop payments were being cleared through
a network of machines that I could look at through glass walls
in San Jose. M-commerce is nothing new, folks. Nor is
B2B e-commerce much newer, but that's another story.)
And of course, it was autotellers and bank cards, as well as
decades of charge-plate card use, that softened consumers
up for the leap of faith arguably required every time you do
a credit-card swipe in some dingy corner store. AOL would
have had a hard time gaining acceptance for its payment
model without all that credibility built up for it in digitally-
networked plastic-card-based payment systems, and the
regulatory extensions needed to make them trustworthy.
Compare the Internet, which only came into public consciousness
less than a decade ago. Look how long it took people to
trust it to the (arguably-still-limited) extent they do today, for
payments. You couldn't put the Internet in your pocket, and
take it anywhere, and clearly see payment on demand on
the faces of merchants you'd never met before. You
could only see it on the screen, at home, and how could you
trust that medium more than that other phosphor-based imaging
technology in the home - i.e., television? With television,
at least, you never get viruses.
So there you have it: my argument that m-commerce (of a sort)
helped make AOL not just possible, but prosperous. "Walled
Garden" is an epithet that might have some force with net-junkie
shut-ins like us, roaming pseudo^H^H^H^H^H^Hcyberspace
for half our waking hours. For the mainstream, however, anybody
with a story about a friend of a friend who got bankrupted by the
dot-com crash (that's almost everybody, these days) has reason
now to shrug and say "Show me the plastic." And how comforting
that plastic is the main bulk material used in a mobile phone.
Yahoo is organic - but so is a weed. AOL is plastic. And so
is DoCoMo.
So don't be too surprised if the first i-mode phones in the
U.S. carry the logo of a major credit card company.
-m
leap@gol.com
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Received on Thu May 10 08:07:14 2001