In the earlier days of the Innurnet Bubble, a major ignition factor in the
stock runup was the public perception that Netscape was going to grow with
the Web, the Web was growing exponentially, and the Web was the Internet
(when in fact only one out of three of these was true.) After that, anybody
else with Internet spelled into their business plan was lofted by the same
illogic: the next Netscape. (Or there's a Greater Fool who will buy flipped
stock, as time went on.)
It wasn't like walled-garden AOL, which was just one company you could buy
stock in. Anybody with an AOL account could see that Eastern Standard Time
date on their e-mail and realize how ultimately *local* AOL was.
The Innurnet Bubble wasn't local. It was the metastasis of user ignorance,
and greed, feeding first Netscape, then a host of other startups. Sure, a
lot of those startups should have happened anyway, but in sane times they
would've gotten a second round of funding, or died, rather than Go Straight
to IPO and Collect One Bazillion Dollars.
I believe, however, that bubble was also fed by the ease with which John Q.
Citizen could just pop any URL into Netscape, and voila: U R There. Seeing
is believing. And if you think you're seeing a revolution everywhere your
busy little fingers walk you to, that's what you'll believe. (Especially if
you're hearing "Revolution, revolution", over and over.) The whole thing
starts to seem very vast. If you're George Gilder, you'll even start a kind
of secular religion. Praise the Lord and Pass the Propaganda. Unless you
Just Don't Get It, in which case you are Darned to Heck.
So it wasn't hard to believe it was a revolution. What was hard to believe
was that there wasn't one.
In Japan, with wireless, I think there were three dampers:
1) They are still crawling in the wreckage of an earlier catastrophic
bubble. Sure they had Bit Valley, but that was a drop in the bucket. You
have to make a real business case, for the most part. Gosh. Fancy that.
2) They already knew there was a World Wide Web - that particular
revolution started without them; and the resulting sound and fury could be
more skeptically regarded (see factor 1).
3) You can't get URLs into mobiles so fast. A cave network that you crawl
through will always seem smaller than one that you can walk around in. With
mobile you have to "let your fingers do the crawling". Hmm. Where's the
next elevator?
In a way, you can think of the iMenu as a numeric-keypad user interface
workaround. It's supplying a bunch of bookmarks in advance. This might be
annoying and intrusive, with subtle overtones of evil, when the bookmarks
come from Microsoft with IE. But when they come with a phone, the user
response is different.
It's more like, "Of course there's an iMenu. After all, would you want a
channel-changer that doesn't have channel select buttons?" The ability to
exit the Garden -- to "climb the Wall" as Andrea puts it -- is a little like
being able to tune in better to certain broadcasts by manually redirecting
your antenna. Not interesting to everybody, but not something you want to
rule out either.
Now: how do you choose iMenu entrants?
Well, you could have an auction, I suppose, but from the revenue-stream
winners of the Web, we already know who'd be way up there. This is phone
companies we're talking about. Phone companies who, in the U.S., felt they
dodged a bullet when they shifted the onus of carrying sexual content onto
the ISPs. As well they might, considering they hadn't been gone very long
from the regulated-monopoly shelter in many cases. Voters would raise hell.
(In Puritan America, anyway.)
No, you can't just offer menu slots to the highest bidder. Better to make
'em jump through hoops, and incentivize them to jump through hoops by
offering packet-charge kickbacks and m-commerce billing.
How does this apply to the present day, outside Japan?
Well, the West is:
1) crawling in the wreckage of a catastrophic bubble
2) we already know there's a World Wide Web. And that it doesn't fit on
the small screen.
3) a Western keypad is about the same number of buttons as a Japanese one.
Same bottleneck.
Finally, there's that moralism-bullet to dodge.
Something like the iMenu is almost an economic and marketing fait accompli,
in this view.
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrea" <anima@gmx.de>
To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2001 5:01 PM
Subject: (keitai-l) Re: Failure, schmailure, show me the money! (was Re:
failure, succ
>
> > I think this 80-20% idea is pretty true. From what I can tell from
> magazine
> > surveys, etc. 80% of users do not venture outside the imode menu.
>
> The stats from NTT Docomo are based on total traffic destination for all
> users, and according to their official stats, i-mode related traffic is
> distributed as follows:
>
> Access iMenu sites: 23%
>
> Access Voluntary web sites: 28%
>
> Access Mail: 49%
>
> (2nd Quarter of 2001 -- 4/01 - 9/01)
> http://www.nttdocomo.com/html/corporate_data2.html
>
> Of course, it may be possible that once some few i-mode users venture
> out of the i-mode menu, they then surf soo much to create these 28% of
> i-mode traffic, but I doubt it.
>
> Another thought: since a lot of unofficial sites are dating and sex
> related (topics that are excluded from the official imenu), I would
> assume that people interested in these topics will ALWAYS find out how
> to get there, no matter how high the walls.
>
> -Andrea
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> This mail was sent to address leap@gol.com
> Need archives? How to unsubscribe? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/
>
>
Received on Sun Dec 30 14:11:23 2001