On Mon, 23 Jul 2007, Nik Frengle wrote:
> The thing is, imode was not a technology... The technology was an MMS
> variant, J2ME (albeit it with a variant profile, but that is just a
> detail, like what colour the background on the screen is: it can be
> changed easily enough), and X-HTML Basic.
Sure, but that could still have been an important point. What it did (or
would have had even the simplest documentation been easily available)
was give the average hacker, or even the average joe who understood
HTML, the ability to make a mobile website. That was a big change from
the WAP/WML days when you had to buy a $250 specification, learn a
markup langage and page-building style, and go through Lord knows what
other hoops in order to get a mobile site up.
Technologically, i-mode was a nearly exact replication of the original
WWW circa the mid-90s, save for the lack of of decent, cheap and widely
available terminals. But for whatever misguided reason, the telcos did
not want to see what happened on the Internet in the mid-90s happen on
their networks, so they made sure that the social atmosphere was quite
different.
Of course, one must never underestimate the ability of management and
marketing to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.
In the end, the truly amazing thing is that i-mode happened at all,
anywhere. Even after reading books such as Matsunaga Mari's, I'm still
mystified as to how anybody let this happen.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974
Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com
Received on Tue Jul 24 06:01:10 2007