Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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Friday, September 22, 2006
Debate: Has OMA lost its mojo?
OMA as in Open Mobile Alliance is an organization consisting of mobile industry players (operators, phone manufacturers, phone software providers etc) that defines standard protocols and applications for mobile phones. What I mean with my question is that the market increasingly ignores what's being churned out from OMA. A few examples:
Push-to-talk: A complete don't-care that took years to specify, even though it's inherently very simple (SIP and a button) yet also very useless to most people.
Instant Messaging: OMA brought in Wireless Village as an OMA standard, yet is now working on replacing it with IMS-based IM. On the other hand, the market goes for direct access to AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, Myspace etc. IM schemes that tie users to operator-dependent communities are completely uninteresting. Operators thought Wireless Village based IM would compete with SMS revenue, and so few operators deployed it. Instead they now deploy direct access to popular IM services via Java applications in the phone. Where's the logic in that? Customer pressure and/or common sense finally taking over?
Web browsing: OMA brought in WAP 1.x from WAP Forum and later defined WAP 2.0. Both are used for payment services and operator portals, but what users want is to browse the normal Internet. The most successful downloadable web browser (Opera Mini) does just that, yet transfers a transcoded markup language to the phone that's not compliant with the WAP standard. It would be logical that Opera used the integrated WAP browser instead of requiring a Java application, but they didn't use that approach for whatever reason (probably for end-to-end control). What's good is: It just works. At least all smartphones handle normal Web sites reasonable well. There's of course still the issue of display sizes etc, so there's need for optimization to phones' real estate, but that can as easily be done via HTML and Javascript.
Media sharing: As MobHappy pointed out in a recent note, sharing photos and videos between phones is not very interesting. Rather you want to put that media on a service that others can access via their phones or PCs. MMS (or email) can be used for sending the photos to the service, something mojungle does via an email gateway, which makes it quite independent of phone used. Yet, e.g. Shozu doesn't, providing the added benefit of interacting with the service, but in my opinion also more hazzle for the user and less phone compatibility. IMS is also intended for media sharing, but again initially for point-to-point transfer (as far as current application specs go), not central sharing. What I'm getting at is that OMA didn't have centralized media sharing in mind when defining MMS (and IMS), rather that it would be a multimedia version of SMS.
Email: Just recently OMA created a mobile email group. Despite that most phones today already have support for the Internet standard protocols. E.g. Vodafone chose to resell RIM's server and handsets as a way to reach corporate customers, yet OMA has nothing in terms of direct access to MS Outlook etc. Many talk Push Email, but they forget that accessing the full set of functionality in MS Outlook (email, calendar, tasks, notes, contacts etc) has nothing to do with Push Email, even though that's also needed for user comfort (or annoyance; your choice).
Blogging: Actually, OMA has completely forgotten to provide support for blogging, which is a good example of the inertia (and arguably closed-mindedness) of OMA standardization. Blogging (and also media sharing) has boomed so fast that it probably wasn't even popular at the time when OMA would have had to make the decision to support it or not.
Social network services: Like Myspace, Lunarstorm etc, that combine IM, blogging, user info, advertizing, e-commerce etc. I haven't seen any specification from OMA even reflecting on such services, and even less seen thoughts on supporting such services.
All in all, when OMA comes out with anything new it's typically way too late and often completely misdirected, and is rather a reflection of yesterdays's walled garden thinking, that consumers and service providers try to break any way they can. It's also a sign of what might have been interesting the year the decision was made, but 2-3 years later might be completely uninteresting. Instead, mobile services that are completely operator and OMA independent have been hugely successful during 2006, and very much in control of the consumer's mind set. Even operators must begin to realize something is wrong here (on their part). I know they are, and some clearly take action, but that doesn't seem to change OMA's agenda. OMA played an important role at the startup of mobile data, but is simply no longer in control where the consumer interest and money is.
Push-to-talk: A complete don't-care that took years to specify, even though it's inherently very simple (SIP and a button) yet also very useless to most people.
Instant Messaging: OMA brought in Wireless Village as an OMA standard, yet is now working on replacing it with IMS-based IM. On the other hand, the market goes for direct access to AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, Myspace etc. IM schemes that tie users to operator-dependent communities are completely uninteresting. Operators thought Wireless Village based IM would compete with SMS revenue, and so few operators deployed it. Instead they now deploy direct access to popular IM services via Java applications in the phone. Where's the logic in that? Customer pressure and/or common sense finally taking over?
Web browsing: OMA brought in WAP 1.x from WAP Forum and later defined WAP 2.0. Both are used for payment services and operator portals, but what users want is to browse the normal Internet. The most successful downloadable web browser (Opera Mini) does just that, yet transfers a transcoded markup language to the phone that's not compliant with the WAP standard. It would be logical that Opera used the integrated WAP browser instead of requiring a Java application, but they didn't use that approach for whatever reason (probably for end-to-end control). What's good is: It just works. At least all smartphones handle normal Web sites reasonable well. There's of course still the issue of display sizes etc, so there's need for optimization to phones' real estate, but that can as easily be done via HTML and Javascript.
Media sharing: As MobHappy pointed out in a recent note, sharing photos and videos between phones is not very interesting. Rather you want to put that media on a service that others can access via their phones or PCs. MMS (or email) can be used for sending the photos to the service, something mojungle does via an email gateway, which makes it quite independent of phone used. Yet, e.g. Shozu doesn't, providing the added benefit of interacting with the service, but in my opinion also more hazzle for the user and less phone compatibility. IMS is also intended for media sharing, but again initially for point-to-point transfer (as far as current application specs go), not central sharing. What I'm getting at is that OMA didn't have centralized media sharing in mind when defining MMS (and IMS), rather that it would be a multimedia version of SMS.
Email: Just recently OMA created a mobile email group. Despite that most phones today already have support for the Internet standard protocols. E.g. Vodafone chose to resell RIM's server and handsets as a way to reach corporate customers, yet OMA has nothing in terms of direct access to MS Outlook etc. Many talk Push Email, but they forget that accessing the full set of functionality in MS Outlook (email, calendar, tasks, notes, contacts etc) has nothing to do with Push Email, even though that's also needed for user comfort (or annoyance; your choice).
Blogging: Actually, OMA has completely forgotten to provide support for blogging, which is a good example of the inertia (and arguably closed-mindedness) of OMA standardization. Blogging (and also media sharing) has boomed so fast that it probably wasn't even popular at the time when OMA would have had to make the decision to support it or not.
Social network services: Like Myspace, Lunarstorm etc, that combine IM, blogging, user info, advertizing, e-commerce etc. I haven't seen any specification from OMA even reflecting on such services, and even less seen thoughts on supporting such services.
All in all, when OMA comes out with anything new it's typically way too late and often completely misdirected, and is rather a reflection of yesterdays's walled garden thinking, that consumers and service providers try to break any way they can. It's also a sign of what might have been interesting the year the decision was made, but 2-3 years later might be completely uninteresting. Instead, mobile services that are completely operator and OMA independent have been hugely successful during 2006, and very much in control of the consumer's mind set. Even operators must begin to realize something is wrong here (on their part). I know they are, and some clearly take action, but that doesn't seem to change OMA's agenda. OMA played an important role at the startup of mobile data, but is simply no longer in control where the consumer interest and money is.
