I suppose my implicit assumption is that everyone has a mobile, and their
mobile is their umbilical. Will people mess around with systems that let you
get that umbilical at one remove, cheaper but also at cost of (otherwise
non-existant) inconvenience? Depends on the price, depends on the
inconvenience.
I'm tending towards the view that a key benefit of 'mobile content' is not
so much revenue per se (and we've had an argument not worth recapitulating
over the role of voice in paying for European 3G)) but stickiness.
That is, Europeans will turn on their phones in 3 years and see one of three
things 'Welcome to Vodafone', Welcome to Orange' or Welcome to T-Mobile'
(or, perhaps, AOL). And people will not argue about whether Nokia or
Ericsson have the best messaging app, but whether Vodafone or Orange do.
If, then, the handset has a role as a personal hub of sorts - if it has your
mail, your news, your video clips and so on - what sorts of incentives are
needed for you to abandon it? You can upgrade handsets, certainly, because
it's all on the SIM (or in the NOS, or whatever). But change operators, and
you lose all that. Kind of like switching from AOL to MSN, say.
If you take this view of the mobile market, then other systems only make
sense if they link into that core. Breaking the phone number away from the
device might be economic (and then again, might not, if you have to buy a
new radio unit). But you're cutting yourself adrift from a lot.
Put another way, how many sisters and fathers and cousins and
computer-illiterate friends has this group, collectively, managed to
persuade to dump AOL and sign onto a cheaper, faster, 'real' ISP'?
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Received on Tue Aug 14 22:25:53 2001