Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Thursday, July 26, 2007
Happy birthday, SMS!
SMS has been with us for 15 years. Its birthday was July 23, so I'm a bit late with the celebration, and I forgot to buy a present too. Oh well...
According to telecom mythology SMS was initially intended for service messages and communication between telecom maintenance workers, but after a while (actually several years) it got picked up by teenagers as a way to cut costs on telephony. The rest is history.
SMS wasn't marketed initially, so its success relied totally on being taken up by users. I don't mean that good technology necessarily sells itself, rather that users didn't see it as a technology at all. Just as a cheaper way to communicate.
SMS is probably the least exciting technology I know, with the possible exception of HTTP, but the interesting thing is what has been done with it (which also applies to HTTP). The majority of SMSs are still transferred between phones and users, but there's also a substantial volume of SMSs transferred for mobile content, tickets etc. Content is no longer sent with the SMS. Rather it includes a link to such content, as it can no longer be transferred in the SMS itself.
Nowadays teenagers try other means for communication, as transferring messages as data is way cheaper than SMS, so SMS is certainly challenged in the long run. Such services are often called "Free SMS", even though SMS is not used. Analogies are of course important for immediate understanding (analogy in function, not in technology).
MMS is not really a competitor, as no one sends peer-to-peer text messages via MMS.
Surprisingly, free SMSs between subscribers on the same network don't seem to lower the total revenue much.
At least in Europe there's still no sign of SMS spam, as the one sending the SMS pays.
SMS remains the main mobile messaging method (volume- and revenue-wise) throughout the world, and is likely to stay that way for many years to come, but expect community services to increasingly take over the traffic and for a much lower per-message cost.
And for some history: Yahoo - SMS History
According to telecom mythology SMS was initially intended for service messages and communication between telecom maintenance workers, but after a while (actually several years) it got picked up by teenagers as a way to cut costs on telephony. The rest is history.
SMS wasn't marketed initially, so its success relied totally on being taken up by users. I don't mean that good technology necessarily sells itself, rather that users didn't see it as a technology at all. Just as a cheaper way to communicate.
SMS is probably the least exciting technology I know, with the possible exception of HTTP, but the interesting thing is what has been done with it (which also applies to HTTP). The majority of SMSs are still transferred between phones and users, but there's also a substantial volume of SMSs transferred for mobile content, tickets etc. Content is no longer sent with the SMS. Rather it includes a link to such content, as it can no longer be transferred in the SMS itself.
Nowadays teenagers try other means for communication, as transferring messages as data is way cheaper than SMS, so SMS is certainly challenged in the long run. Such services are often called "Free SMS", even though SMS is not used. Analogies are of course important for immediate understanding (analogy in function, not in technology).
MMS is not really a competitor, as no one sends peer-to-peer text messages via MMS.
Surprisingly, free SMSs between subscribers on the same network don't seem to lower the total revenue much.
At least in Europe there's still no sign of SMS spam, as the one sending the SMS pays.
SMS remains the main mobile messaging method (volume- and revenue-wise) throughout the world, and is likely to stay that way for many years to come, but expect community services to increasingly take over the traffic and for a much lower per-message cost.
And for some history: Yahoo - SMS History
