(keitai-l) Re: From Japan.Inc: The Dirty Little Secret of i-Mode

I think I'm with Nick, here.

<rant>

Unofficial sites don't make money?  This is a very
top-down, regulated society.  If it's not an
*official* way to make money, it's usually
an *illegal* way to make money.  Not that that
many people are stopped from doing this -- of the
44 people who died in Kabukicho the other
night, most were patronizing a business that
operated openly, despite being illegal. I don't
like this cultural pattern much, but it's the way things
are here.

If you're really concerned about the money,
let's do the accounting the other way: what
has been the net *loss* in the U.S. bubble?
Only getting nickel-dime payments, and only
if you jump through NTT DoCoMo hoops the
right way, should be compared to the hundreds
of billions of dollars flushed down into all those
e-commerce startups, flying high on all that
New Economy rhetoric with its inflated productivity-
growth arguments.  Better the straitjacket society
than lunatics running wild?  I'm not saying that, but
somebody oughta bring George Gilder over here
and make him live on 1500 yen per day for meals,
at least until he stops saying "paradigm shift."

</rant>

-michael turner
leap@gol.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Nick May" <nick@kyushu.com>
To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2001 12:47 AM
Subject: (keitai-l) Re: From Japan.Inc: The Dirty Little Secret of i-Mode


> keitai-l@appelsiini.net writes:
>
>
> >One of the things I had been lead to believe about i-Mode was that
content
> >providers have a reasonble shot at making money. Apparently not:
>
> it says about half do. If so, that is a fairly "reasonable shot" in my
> book...
>
> >erhaps I am late to the game and this was common knowledge amongst people
> >in the know, but this sure as heck changes my thinking about the
> >importance
> >of the i-mode phenomenon and it's relevence to future mobile wireless
> >services in the rest of the world.
>
>
> I am a little puzzled as to why (and as to what your thinking was before
> you read this rather hysterical and silly article). Some sites within the
> docomo portal make money, some do not. Some sites outside the portal make
> money for the site owners (directly or otherwise) and some do not. Not all
> that different from the web in fact. Except that if your site is within
> the portal, billing is rather easier...
>
> Why is any of this a surprise and why should it change anyone's attitude
> to I-mode in a negative way? Sure - imode is not a license to print money
> for people with i-mode sites - but who ever believed it was?
>
>
>
> >to the non-exportable business
> >model,
>
> Why exactly is it non-exportable?
>
> >to the extreme devotion of Japanese to there keitai's
>
> Extreme? - sure - people like their keitai's - but Japanese keitai are
> rather more likable. I have just hit London this morning and my - English
> keitai are so QUAINT and UGLY and CLUNKY! (so are English people actually
> - it is like walking into a Dicken's novel -  how this Englishman has got
> used to the svelte Japanese....)
>
> >and cute
> >gadgetry in general, i-mode suddenly looks like little more then a
> >cultural
> >curiosity.
>
> Er - I fail to see anything in your email that demonstrates this, and
> anything in the article that really suggests it.  Do you regard the www as
> merely a cultural curiosity simply because many websites do not "make
> money" directly or otherwise for the companies that own them?
>
> (from the article)
> >** Control a large number of the Web sites that you regularly visit
>
> well - in-portal sites are regularly visited because they have quality
> content. They have quality content because docomo requires they do as a
> condition of being a portal site. Docomo don't stop you going to a
> non-portal site,  nor do they try to control or restrict them.
>
> I found the second part of the article rather undermined the first. The
> first was 'shock horror, imode controlled by corporate entity, not
> profitable for sites" and the second "shock horror, sex on imode, very
> profitable.
>
> In particular I was rather perplexed by the way the author could conclude
> that sex sites must be profitable because they keep going but that non-sex
> sites that keep going could not be profitable...
>
> I think the "dirty little secret" is that the site wants our ad
> impressions.
>
> Nick
>
> >
>
>
>
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>
>


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