On Tuesday, 18 September 2001 6:18 PM drew.freyman@nokia.com wrote:
>> The Ministry of General
>> Affairs put out a report on 6.26 on the significant business issues
>> confronting us on our way to 3G. Most of the discussion focused on
>> 2G problems--closed model and proprietary specifications leading to
>> limited business opportunities for non-carrier participants.
Well Nokia would certainly hope so I guess ;-)
Proprietary = BAD / Inferior = Doomed
Many people appear to take the relationship to be self-evident.
I have seen this and many other arguments that the closed model /
proprietary specification is somehow inherently a disadvantage, and it
only worked here in Japan due to some unique correlation between the
length of girls skirts and the momentary alignment of mercury and
alpha-major during the summer cuttlefish spawning.
The old rhetoric - It's just a Japan thing and it cant happen elsewhere.
Whilst I am a VERY strong supporter of Open Systems and architectures in
many instances, I do not believe it is ALWAYS a superior model, and I
think this is one case.
When people buy a Porsche they happily take it half way across a city to
the Porsche dealer for servicing and will often buy only genuine Porsche
parts at 2-3x the cost. A Porsche owner would argue that it is a
greatly superior car exactly because the company maintains tight control
over a great number of aspects both in a production process and
thereafter.
To get something superior (product or service) _some_ people are willing
to pay more AND suffer additional restrictions so long as the added
value represents a fair trade off.
What represents a fair trade off ?
None of the currently available open systems can even start to compare
to iMode or the other Japanese Services that existed 1 year ago. Even
in Europe, and despite the excellent image of Nokia I think this would
justify the fair trade off for a big percentage of the market.
[The carriers didn't catch on before now]
The secondary advantage for the proprietary (iMode style) model is that
once users shift there is a powerful lock in, it's a one way tide.
The real argument for success in such case ...
Does the proprietary Model allow sufficiently better services to be
deployed such that any disadvantages of the proprietary network would
represent a fair trade off to a sufficient number of users to allow the
service to reach critical mass ?
Regards,
David Davies
http://www.intadev.com
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Received on Tue Sep 18 13:26:55 2001