At 03:09 2001-09-19, drew wrote:
>Just one point about Europe. I believe the SMS market has generated as much
>if not more revenues for carriers there than the Japanese mobile internet
>market has for DCM, KDDi, J-Phone (somebody jump in if they have data to the
>contrary). However, SMS has required a fraction of the investment.
The technical infrastructure is relatively cheap, yes. But loads of stupid
VC money have been poured into stone age technology and services such as
SMS games, news, crippled interactive services etc. How many of these will
survive the disruption when (if...) 2.5G actually starts to work? We are
already seeing a formidable slaughter up here in Wireless Valley.
>I believe a more credible explanation of why WAP did not work is because
>nobody was concerned for it to work. The initial deployments were more like
>tests (even though you site the huge investments in WAP it is nothing
>really) and a very few of the Europen carriers seemed serious about it.
>Little promotion to end users, primarily media driven frenzy. Everybody was
>waiting for GPRS. Now that you see GPRS starting to happen, the European
>carriers are doing just as any business making large investments would:
>They are asking what kind of services can generate revenues and what kind of
>platform is necessary to support them. They are working with terminal
>manufacturers and platform providers to pull together an end-to-end
>revenue-generating solution.
I don't really agree. I can not see any compelling handsets and services,
or business models for that matter, in the current and soon to be released
offerings from European operators. What we see now is a GPRS phase 1 based
on old WAP crap (1.x), boring handsets and lousy business models based on
the infamous European lose-win-lose model (as opposed to Natsuno-san's
saying that i-mode was based on win-win-win for end the user, operator and
content provider). So unfortunately, not that much have been learnt from
Japan.
There is a chance that they will learn more when i-mode will be launched,
hopefully then not as delayed as officially said though. i-mode in Europe
may cause a necessary turbulence among operators.
The big challenge will then be to try to convince deceived users yet again
to start believe in mobile Internet, when GPRS phase 2 happens (XHTML/WAP 2
browsers, color handsets, hopefully also more open business models, related
to 502i spec in i-mode).
I do agree however that DoCoMo takes a monopolistic (although mostly not
proprietary) role as being _the_ editor. There are of course shortcomings
with this models, but it is still a lot better than a situation where the
operator tries not only to be the editor, but also the content provider, as
we still see too much of in Europe. What comes next? Maybe they will go
into funeral services next?
/g
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Received on Thu Sep 20 12:33:43 2001