Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

MEX has an interesting piece that complements my note about Who actually gets the loyalty from consumers, where it's clear third-party now provides the interesting services, not the operators, and that operators need to refocus to enabling services rather than providing said services, that they anyway don't do.

It's a destructive/static loop:
1. Operators want to provide also the information services,
2. but they don't,
3. yet others do,
4. but operators don't want them to,
5. because, ... (start over at 1.)
Operators need to break out of this loop and realize what consumers want, what operators are good at and what they actually can make money on, and in this case it's providing billing and other "backbone" services for information services.

Sure, operators often partner with leading service providers, but that's once the services have become established (see Flickr, ShoZu, MSN etc). In this hectic "Web 2.0" era, time is of the absolute essence, so if anything hinders service providers from establishing themselves quickly they might completely lose out on the opportunity, hence operators can't be relied upon as shopping windows for new services. See Web 2.0 on overdrive for more on this phenomenon.

MEX - the strategy forum for mobile user experience - Why value is slipping away from the operators