hi Benjamin,
time to market
i-mode was a bad imitation of the UP.Products, which already
ran successfully over CDPD (AMPS/TDMA) in the US when i-mode
project started. why DoCoMo selected C-HTML and TCP was, IMHO,
they didn't understand the data communication over wireless.
in Japan, before the i-mode for PDC, they already had UP.Browser
for PHS. one Panasonic model I know was done easily and quickly
by some guys in Osaka and was marketed for "real-time keiba news".
it looks like ET, has a large screen above a joy-stick and small
key pad (not a flip phone).
I know they did some experiments, and reported TCP worked well,
contrary to what the gaijins said. it was wrong. in a real
network, RTT changes irregularly to make TCP get lost what's
happening over the link, and this was not simulated in the test
(I believe).
in early 1998, some companies had parallel teams doing C-HTML
and HDML. they transferred intelligence between the groups.
maybe someone from Openwave can tell us more.
for one handset maker I know, the C-HTML browser needed about
10 times memory than the UP.Browser, and maybe twice as slower.
the NEC GRIMM i-mode center was way more costly than the UP.Link
gateway which was already very expensive (because they had no
competitor).
about what's said in Mari Matsunaga's book, I believe:
(1) no DoCoMo/NEC guy really understood XML/HTTP/TCP back then,
so the decision makers had nothing to tell which was better.
(2) they felt out of control, so they chose something familiar:
"compact everything"
they did make some modifications, like HTTP get/post for message
sending/receiving (without retry). I talked with a middle level
DoCoMo guy that it was too costly and yet no good compared with
SMS J-Phone/TU-KA were already using. I was told that DoCoMo
would never use SMS, a backwater technology ... DoCoMo knocked
the door of Logica two years later to implement SMS for their
3G FOMA network. they did learn something.
today, i-mode mail provides the worst service among all Japanese
operators, lags far behind au/KDDI, J-Phone, and TU-KA.
everyone else in Japan use WAP now and they are all doing better
than DoCoMo in the term of data services and traffics per user.
why DoCoMo is so bright is because the value of a network is ~
to that of the nodes^2 (and this explains the volume of content).
cheers,
Ken
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Received on Tue Jun 18 13:10:17 2002