On Tuesday, June 18, 2002, at 02:35 , Curt Sampson wrote:
>> No matter what the Japanese would have come up with, it would already
>> have
>> been working on both the European and the American standard. WAP would
>> have never happened - European networks with cross Atlantic
>> partnerships
>> and alliances would have said "We use the Japanese solution because it
>> works also across the Atlantic".
>
> I have a hard time swallowing this. Take a look at what AT&T has
> implemented in terms of bringing i-Mode to the U.S., and then tell
> me that America is willing to import the Japanese solution.
Discounted - because this situation is different from what I described.
In the situation I described there would be a proven i-mode' that was
implemented in Japan' where it worked both on GSM' and CDMA' including
interoperability from a customer point of view. In that situation AT&T'
would be in the position to say, let's adopt i-mode' from Japan' over
WAP' from Europe' because what the Japanese' have developed and
implemented is already operational and proven to work.
On the other hand, in the situation now, there is no operational i-mode
other than for PDC and this means customisation if i-mode was to be
implemented anywhere else. Customisation is - to say the least - less
smooth a process than the roll-out of an already adapted solution.
Please note that I have used ' after entities in the example I described
in order to distinguish the respective entities and the environment
they're in from the entities as they are now.
>> How much larger/heavier are we talking here ? 10 grams ? 20 grams ?
>> Sure, it is not that 10 or 20 grams isn't noticeable. But then again,
>> it
>> is not *that* noticeable.
>
> Instead of saying "increase handset weight by 20 grammes," put it in
> these terms: "increase handset weight by 33%." Does it sound "not *that*
> noticable" now?
What is this ? A lesson in propaganda techniques ?
Besides, and I repeat, most if not all CDMA handsets in Japan are
nowhere heavier that their PDC counterparts if bananas are compared to
bananas and apples to apples. Thus it cannot possibly be due to PDC that
they lost 10 or 20 grams. It is thus absolutely reasonable to assert
that if the Japanese have managed to make domestic CDMA handset as
light, then they would also have managed to make domestic GSM handset as
light.
>>> However, this argument has nothing to do with DoCoMo's creation of
>>> a coherent, smoothly functioning and pretty-much open mobile data
>>> services model.
>>
>> Which doesn't preclude that this or any similar functioning model
>> could not have been built on top of CDMA, GSM, PHS or any mixed
>> environment.
>
> But the fact is, it wasn't. Or, more importantly, the fact is, it was
> built on top of Japan's mess. Which I think goes to show that the whole
> thing just isn't quite the awful disaster you make it out to be.
This exactly is what I am having a problem with. The attitude that "if
there is a little bit of shining metal somewhere, then the whole thing
is assumed to be gold until any traces of shining metal can be removed".
Look around you and ask yourself honestly if you are applying this very
same standard to anything else. I'd be very surprised if you did.
> Basically, you seem to be saying that, by your theoretical model, the
> Japanese keitai system is a disaster, and completely ignoring that Japan
> has the best mobile phones in the world, bar none, for everything but a
> very few features such as roaming and SIM cards.
I am not "ignoring", I am disputing that Japanese phones are better
overall.
But even if they did, still PDC and more importantly the way it has been
implemented is in a mess that should be sorted out. There is no
correlation between the phones and that mess. The Japanese manufacturers
have learned how to make phones partly ***despite*** the mess, and
partly because they don't stand a chance with their products in the
international market no matter what. Their switching and radio gear is
not competitive and their OSS systems are an absolute catastrophe that
has significantly contributed to the bad debt mess of Japanese operators
such as Astel and TuKa, to name those whose businesses were crippled in
the process of using and trusting that stuff, which doesn't mean that
the others didn't get their share of sinking money.
If you knew how these systems work and how the companies who make them
see themselves and their products, you wouldn't be surprised at the
recent news from MiZuHo bank.
Sure, you are working on the (more or less open standard) Java stuff
that runs on the Japanese phones and you like what you see because it is
probably done well. I don't doubt it for a moment, but I dispute that
this is a proper way to judge the rest of it. The trouble is that shiny
and polished front ends of a value added service don't say anything
about how well the entire system is designed. The phones and their
internet capability, that is just the tip of an iceberg - on top that
iceberg may seem little and beautiful, but underneath it is huge and
dangerous.
So, the point is that, if Japanese manufacturers are capable of making
good on top of such a horrible mess, then what could they have achieved
if they were liberated from that mess underneath. That is what
competition and open markets are about. Companies excel in things they
do well and anybody benefits. But also, companies who don't excel have
to leave the field for those who do and again anybody benefits.
> As for the "toy" features you go on about, a few points:
>
> 1. You have never adequately explained what the "non-toy"
> features are that are more important.
You keep missing the point. I *never* said what is important or what is
not.
I invited you to examine yourself more critically as you seem to be so
certain which things are important and which are not. I merely said that
it is not certain that features that are popular are more important than
missing features that are not on offer. I stand by this and add that
this is all the more applicable in a market where fashion has more to do
with the popularity of features than necessity.
> 2. The presence of some of the "toy" features, such as a web
> browser, allows me to do my business stuff, too. The same
> technology that allows me to check my horiscope also lets me
> trade my stocks.
Again, I am not saying that this or that feature is a bad thing to have.
What I am saying is that there are other things which are missing and
that the fact that they are missing should not be construed as not being
important.
Even features that may seem inferior to you like SMS can from a
different perspective have a superior usefulness. For example, the fact
that SMS has QoS, while email has not. When you send someone an SMS you
will get a notification telling you if the message has been received or
if it has failed. In business this can be paramount and for many
business GSM users it is If someone is in meetings all day and you can't
seem to get hold of them, you can send them an SMS and wait. The moment
they get out of their meeting and switch their phone back on, they will
receive the SMS and you get a confirmation, so you know that now is the
window you have been trying to find all day - now is the time to call
the other party.
This is just one example of a side effect of one feature that otherwise
may seem inferior to mobile phone email. The point here is not SMS is
better than email, instead the point is that there are uses to various
things you and me may not even thought of and therefore it is by no
means *certain* that features which have not been tested in a market
could not turn out to be useful even if they would appear on the face of
it inferior to other similar features that are already there. The point
is you cannot tell if it is certain, therefore the word is "arguable".
In the wider context that means that there is no such thing as a
benevolent monopolist who knows what is best for us and should therefore
be allowed to make all the decisions for the rest of us.
> 3. Some of the features you currently consider "toy" features
> are likely not to be in the near future. Colour screens used
> to be a toy feature on PCs, too, but when was the last time
> you saw someone buy a new business PC with a monochrome or
> grey-scale screen?
I am not even sure if I consider a colour screen a toy feature. Sure, I
don't feel that it would add a lot of value *for myself*, but I can see
some usefulness.
If anything, the toy feature property would be a fuzzy set, so you would
have a scale from -say- 1 to 10 meaning something is very much a toy
feature or something is less a toy feature or something is as much a toy
features as it is not etc etc etc.
More important would be the usefulness property which also would be a
fuzzy set. Then there would be a fashion property, again a fuzzy set.
The point is that there should be a balance between fashion and
usefulness so that people who are more interested in the usefulness of a
phone than its fashionable state will not have to compromise
significantly more than others and vice versa.
> As for the IBM and monopoly stuff you go on about, well, again
> you're attacking a straw man. I'm not saying protectionism is always
> good, but I am saying that there is physical proof in my pocket
> right now that it's not always the disaster you claim it is.
That is not proof. It is your assumption based on the "shiny metal is
present ergo the whole thing is better assumed to be gold until no shiny
metal is visible any more" formula.
> If your open standards and what not are going to put a stone-age
> European phone in my pocket again, I, and a lot of other people,
> are going to say, "no way."
Yet another "something is either black or white" classification and the
resulting scenario I cannot agree with.
Before the background I have given, basically what you are saying here
seems to be the following ...
1 - if more choice introduces things I cannot relate to, then I don't
want more choice not only for myself but also for everybody else
2 - In order to achieve my goal under #1, I will argue that more choice
of the kind I don't want is not only unimportant, but also I am going to
claim that it will wipe out any previous choice
To which I can only respond "What is it that you are afraid of ?"
Clearly, if the Japanese cellular system is so superior to anything else
that no matter what happened nobody would choose anything different
anyway, why would this superior system then be so threatened by the
advent of alternatives that you seem to believe it would not only
disappear but also none of its properties would survive ?
kind regards
benjamin
Received on Tue Jun 18 10:40:10 2002