On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, Renfield Kuroda wrote:
> Can you elaborate on this? What is a normal phone -- non i-mode? And what does
> "hurting real bad" mean: depressed stock price? lower sales/revenue? loss of
> marketshare?
Yes, a phone you use for talking, without extra "services", the actual
handset doesnt support extra "services", and is only designed for talking.
It's 10x cheaper than i-mode version, has less user-confusing functions
etc. Au, jphone, you name them have normal phones and normal service for
sale. Did I mention the phone is usually smaller, lighter, and has much
longer battery life? Maybe your docomo shop sells those phones, but none
in my area offer anything like this anymore (you can buy a i-mode phone
without i-mode, but you pay more and you pay a LOT more for the phone)...
> > but then again, none of the
> > phones are actually "sold" for need, they are "pushed" on to customers
> > with extra options whether they need it or not. (this coming from a person
> > who actually works fairly close with a docomo sales shop)
>
> Again, elaboration would be appreciated. Are you saying the high churn
> rate in Japan is a false demand created by DoCoMo? Since you work
> fairly close with a docomo sales shop, are there some secret coersive
> sales tactics docomo shop employees are trained in to push unnecessary
> services on unsuspecting customers?
How many 70 years old grandmothers do you know that absolutely need imode,
short mail, call waiting, and call forwarding? Out of those, how many do
you think actually know what any of those services are for? I don't know,
maybe it's just my location in south japan or something, but quite often I
see japanese people look at any material involving a
higher-than-one-percent mix of katakana into the stream, and I start to
wonder, do they really understand any of it? (answer: they dont)
Most people come to buy a phone. Since docomo doesn't sell phones anymore,
they are forced to buy insert-model-name-here-ends-with-i (and usually
they "want" to buy a 503 model, of course). Lets say a customer brings in
a damaged phone. say, 501i or even 209i model. If that user was actively
using i-mode you'd think they would have bookmarks, saved images, etc,
right? Well, none of the units that I've seen that were returned and
exchanged for 503i ever had any evidence whatsoever that any of the
"browsing" features were ever used. Sure, there is lots of talk time, and
usually a flood of junk mail in the mailbox, but nothing that I would call
serious or even casual use. Even broken 503i models dont show any use.
Most still have the preloaded (as in F-series) or no applis at all... No
bookmarks, etc. What's up with that? If everyone was "using" I-mode as
much as docomo claims...
> > Can you guess I don't own a docomo phone? Not to mention the price,
> > service, and usability (for TALKING, nothing else), offered by other
> > carriers much exceeds DoCoMo "service".
>
> And yet DoCoMo has maintained dominant marketshare for years...
If your company is selling phones (can never end that revenue stream,
right?) and tacks on a bunch of expensive and high-tech looking shit (that
not so many people use), nothing's wrong with this business strategy.
By parallel, your average computer manufacturer would preload $10000 DVD
mastering software on each consumer PC and sold the resulting machine for
$13000, hoping that clueless customer would buy it anyway
> > What's the big deal about looking at a web page on a 160x160 screen?
> Or sending email? Or customizing a ringtone?
Have you actually customized a ring tone on any model > 502 lately? Unless
you are a musician you probably should stay out of it. Why is so much
money being made out of ringtone machines where you pay anywhere from $1
to $2 to download a tune to your phone? Oh yeah, and you can't edit it
after that.
And I don't know about you, but if I have to send more than 10 words by
email, it does not matter what I am doing or where I am, it can wait until
I can access a normal computer, or it isn't important enough to bother
with.
And finally, why does docomo only have 2 class C's allocated to their
ENTIRE multibillion i-mode subscriber "service"?
Last I checked, that was only ~500 IP's, can't be that less than 500
people are using i-mode all over the entire japan at the same time, no?
tim
--
・‥…━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━…‥・
timecop at japan.co.jp | ＯＡ通信サービス株式会社 | NTT DoCoMo
Please don't CC me on anything sent to mailing lists or send
me email directly unless it's a privacy issue, thanks.
・‥…━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━…‥・
[ Need archives? How to unsubscribe? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Tue Nov 20 03:00:40 2001