(keitai-l) Re: more imode nonsense.

Beyond the technical there was the market ecology:

1. A 91/9 split on revenue that "let a thousand flowers bloom" in terms of
content.
2. A heft data charge model that made DoCoMo wealthy.
3. Control over handset specification that actually made DoJa reasonable to
develop in.

William Volk
CEO. MyNuMo


> From: Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net>
> Reply-To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
> Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:01:05 +0900 (JST)
> To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
> Subject: (keitai-l) Re: more imode nonsense.
> 
> 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
> 
> This mail was sent to address bvolk@bonusmobile.com
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