Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Saturday, December 02, 2006
Chasing rainbows, this time TV-style
Media: Making money on wireless will take years provides another example of the strange logic in our industry: "To make mobile data a success we always need to utilize the most bleeding edge technologies, as we've given up on doing nothing with the older technologies".
We all know that's irrational thinking, still we can't let go. The problem with the latest technologies is that it's all investments and no availability, while established technologies for information exchange get forgotten in the chase for something else that analysts and equipment providers deem as the Holy Grail that will generate revenue, as supposedly the previous technologies can't or are not hip enough.
Rather I would say the only technologies that can generate real revenue are the ones that have reached some level of critical mass, in terms of phones supporting it, in terms of network capacity, in terms of service providers taking the risk and time to offer good services, in terms of user acceptance etc.
Third-party service providers know this, and have to know this, as their only interest is to get the most users for their services, so they need to go for technologies that exist. I've seen exceptions though: It took quite a while before Flickr supported other than Symbian OS phones. Possibly due to development issues, but nevertheless. At the same time social networking, chat, feed, etc services don't need anything new at all. Almost all phones support such services.
An extreme case in point: The SMS way to lend or borrow
Operators can of course stop third-party from providing interesting services, as indicated in US operators fight for their right to not innovate.
We all know that's irrational thinking, still we can't let go. The problem with the latest technologies is that it's all investments and no availability, while established technologies for information exchange get forgotten in the chase for something else that analysts and equipment providers deem as the Holy Grail that will generate revenue, as supposedly the previous technologies can't or are not hip enough.
Rather I would say the only technologies that can generate real revenue are the ones that have reached some level of critical mass, in terms of phones supporting it, in terms of network capacity, in terms of service providers taking the risk and time to offer good services, in terms of user acceptance etc.
Third-party service providers know this, and have to know this, as their only interest is to get the most users for their services, so they need to go for technologies that exist. I've seen exceptions though: It took quite a while before Flickr supported other than Symbian OS phones. Possibly due to development issues, but nevertheless. At the same time social networking, chat, feed, etc services don't need anything new at all. Almost all phones support such services.
An extreme case in point: The SMS way to lend or borrow
Operators can of course stop third-party from providing interesting services, as indicated in US operators fight for their right to not innovate.
