Nick, you raised interesting points and I quite agree with you CocaCola
analogy.
When you ask "when will carriers add things that benefit consumers ?"
it is quite clear that no company likes to destroy value. People are
happy now with
the prices, why bother if no competitive solution arises ? It is the
same story with
the outrageous SMS prices in Europe. Why not proper e-mail or lower prices ?
In many ways mobile phones are not anymore about communication only,
making steps not only in your "communication share" (with people you know)
but also in your "entertainment share" (games or else), your "social
network share"
(with people you don't know), and more recently in your "money source share"
(be it wallet phone, mobile banking or else)
Also, one very undervalued aspect is that mobile phones are the only item
for the last fifty years to make their entry in everybody's pocket.
Visa cards are not for everybody and watches are gradually declining.
Mobiles are also a formidable "personal marketing tool", which is already
reflected by the price of advertisment in mobile ads (roughly 10 times
Internet
ones if I remember correctly).
So you could say that mobiles currently have a large "attention share" which
nobody values properly... People in advertising may have a better idea
but still
don't get it I think.
To come back to music on mobile/iPod/whatever, the idea is actually not to
think about "how can I load my music" but "what musical experience do I
want".
Music is not a file and business models should be thought about with the
"experience" in mind. Do you need a song to be forever in your device ?
Do you need to have it played in your home stereo ?
Some new and interesting business models for mobile music are arising in
Korea,
building on their fixed internet experience. You have "all-you-can-eat" or
"one month rental" formulas.
The final idea being to increase the music market size on the whole.
If that means the death of CD singles due to mobile music, so be it...
Problem for carriers is to find viable models and convince both Labels
and the Regulator,
as those two are not very willing to change anything and just look at
the eroding CD sales.
Last, frankly, I think the argument of "high speed network" is nothing
more than marketing.
Even on fixed internet you do not need 40Mbps to browse the web
and for P2P, you are mostly limited by your counterpart anyway...
Real value is in convenience, while maintaining an "acceptable level" of
piracy.
Think about CD burners before MP3, video copy before DVDs.
Think also about the huge success of convenience stores despite their
high prices.
On mobile and for files of a few MB, 3G is just fine. Price is for the
service, not the KB anymore.
Looking back I hope I did not get carried away too much (^^;;;)
-- Benjamin
nick may wrote:
>On Dec 7, 2004, at 4:46 PM, Gerhard Fasol wrote:
>
>
>
>>How do you mean competitive? The competition is between KDDI, DoCoMo
>>and Vodafone, and PHS.
>>
>>
>
>No!
>
>I think this is simply to misconstrue the problem. In the medium term
>the competition is between ALL the methods of getting data onto what is
>probably the single device (pda/keitai/ipod, whatever) that users are
>prepared to carry around.
>
>Coca Cola claim that they are after 'throatshare" and thus that they
>compete with water - that's a bit "precious" - but if it comes to
>getting mp3s onto "the device I will carry whatever that is" , 3G IS in
>competition with all the other methods (wifi and direct transfer after
>broadband download). If I have a 3G phone that I buy cheap and I don't
>use it much, I suspect I COST the carriers money....
[ excessive quoting removed by moderator ]
Received on Tue Dec 7 14:06:02 2004