From: "David Davies" <david@intadev.com>
> While most of us on the list know enough to dismiss these comments as
> ridiculous, (so much so that they don't justify a response) they do risk
> getting picked up by the usual entourage of Japan Bashing foreign press,
> or simply misinforming newcomers to the technology.
While clearly inflammatory in places, Tim's points--those worth addressing,
anyway--are not so far off the mark that they merit no response whatsoever.
For example: to his claim that many discarded handsets show no evidence
of browsing or e-mail use, it ought to be pointed out that the discarders
are a self-selected group to a great extent. If they can get cheaper
mobile voice service, and were getting sick of i-mode spam 20 times a
day, and didn't want to figure out how to change their e-mail address,
that's a demographic that will be overrepresented among those
who discard i-mode handsets. End of story? Not necessarily, but it's a
start on an explanation for what he's seen.
It seems to me that I've seen figures--quoted by Ren? I should search
the archives--showing that there are quite a few i-mode handset owners
who never avail themselves of the non-voice services, and that there is
a pronounced age split in the degree of use of i-mode. It would make
sense that, the further out you got in Japan's increasingly geriatric
countryside, the more you'd find discarded i-mode handsets with no
evidence of true i-mode use.
As for this bit about "the usual entourage of Japan Bashing foreign
press", the risk seems miniscule, and not really worth worrying about unless
you're a foreigner here angling in the dry wells of venture capital, wishing
you could quell dissent from a uniformly rosy view of the phenomenon.
At least until you had the money.
Perhaps this is the place to point out that almost nobody, so far, has
responded to Daniel Helmer's original post, with a strawman like Tim
so conveniently at hand.
Daniel Helmer's comments are far more likely to attract attention than
Tim's--they are wittily introduced, attractively packaged, and well
thought out. Why don't we get back to what HE had to say, and
proceed to energetically ignore Tim?
To get a start on this: I see in the mobile phone a bit more potential
for "m-Commerce" than Daniel Helmer does. Sure, if you insist that
"m-Commerce = e-Shopping + e-Buying on a mobile phone", that's
not likely to take off, at least for durable goods. (Music shopping
could work, but that requires fast downloads and copy protection.)
But what about the rich user experience of the print catalog, or what
I call "m-Commerce Classic"?
A number of e-tailers have begun producing mail-order print
catalogs, with even Amazon getting into the act recently. If you
decouple the webshop presentation graphics from its business logic,
there's no reason you can't shoehorn some subset of that graphics
into the highly portable medium of a print catalog, and some subset
(if not all) of the customer order-entry/order-tracking/what-have-you
onto the mobile phone screen. No, the graphics can't be dynamic
anymore, but let's face it--except for the occasional tasty (or at
least mercifully brief) Flash intro, don't you find most of that
stuff jumping in your face when you're trying to read just a little
bit irritating, not to mention tacky?
Shopping on the web has lost a lot of its luster in the last year
or so. People aren't even buying books so much anymore,
Amazon's last hope of avoiding Chapter 11. Reading is such
a chore in these stressful times. But the print catalog--what an
escape. Why boot up your PC when you can browse on the
sofa? And if you could order from that catalog by using a
mobile handset, why wouldn't you?
Admittedly, this is more like *im*mobile commerce, but
it could work, in Couch Potato America.
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
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Received on Tue Nov 20 07:58:53 2001