On Tue, 19 Sep 2006, ben@benmiller.com wrote:
> The market may not be massive, but it will probably generate high
> margins. Think in terms of crackberries for the financial community.
Well, I've not looked into what the Japanese financial community is
using these days, but I have been an IT guy in a bank in NYC, and
watched (admittedly with not a only a little jealousy) the whole
Blackberry thing pop up there in the late 1990s.
(Though I have to admit, those Motorola two-way pagers with the
four-line display from the early 90s (maybe it was about '94 I had one
thrust upon me?) were, in some ways, almost as cool. Or is it just my
nostalgia?)
Anyway, having used the BB and Japanese keitai pretty extensively,
I can't really see why you'd bother with one over the other, unless
you were terribly, terribly critically inclined towards getting your
messages ASAP and you couldn't actually be bothered to do a mail check
after getting out of the subway.
Essentially, Japanese phones have had for at least five years what the
Blackberry has now: basic web and e-mail. Yeah, a better keyboard for
English; but for Japanese people the numeric あかさたなはまらやお pad
is, as far as I can tell, just fine. Certainly works for me.
The BB is a good product, but, this just _so_ feels like one of those
Japanese market entry failures.
> ...are there reasons why the Japanese-language input product available
> in the US (http://www.namikiteru.com/en/index1.html) would not be
> relatively easy to implement?
Well, first of all, it's obviously not easy enough that they can
actually manage to roll out the ability to use the Japanese language in
the initial release in Japan.
That speaks volumes, actually, for something like this. Either they've
done a brilliant job and gotten radio so cheap that they just don't care
if it sells or not, or they've got huge problems ahead of them that
they just don't realize. Given the number of foreigners I've met who
don't understand why they don't use SMS here ("because such primitive
technology sucks, and has sucked here since about 1999"--hello!), I
would certainly not be surprised if it was the latter.
Anyway, you tell me what the Blackberry does that makes it better than,
oh, say, my P209i.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974
Received on Tue Sep 19 19:36:40 2006