Some comparison between JP and EU...
In this days I am meeting for a research most of the Italian mobile
operators.
My impression is that there is still a lot of fear in opening-up the
network to 3rd parties content providers. There is even more fear in
letting the users produce and share their contents by setting up
personal pages or blogs.
Looks like that they still want to control the content by setting up
specific agreements with each provider. This is quiet different from
the general, well defined, transparent and much more open approach
introduced by Ntt DoCoMo with i-mode (Very well explained in Jeff Funk
book ;-) ).
This soft "Walled Garden" strategy by the end looks like it is
producing a very poor variety of contents and services. Smaller content
providers are out-of-the-game and end-users are not able to produce and
share content (The only way maybe is MMS... But it is quiet limited)
I am actually using 3 , Tim, Vodafone and Wind services and I have to
say that they are quiet disappointing. They should have learned some
lessons from Japan (And European failures like Vizzavi)...
Looks like that their strategy is focused in avoiding the "commodity
effect" and retain more value, differentiation, and so maybe more
profits and capture more users but...
Do you think that this approach has any sense? Is this something that
can be sustained in the future?
Is not more logic to be focused on creating an efficient and open
service platform for a rich user experience?...
There are many other disappointing things in EU operator' strategies.
Looks Vodafone is expecting a 100% ARPU increase coming from the data
services that is something not experienced in Japan... but this is
another story...
Ciao
Giovanni
Received on Fri Apr 11 18:28:44 2003