> >Why don't we get back to what HE had to say, and
> >proceed to energetically ignore Tim?
>
> Thanks Michael for bringing the discussion back on track.
Count yourself lucky. Usually, I'm Mr Topic Drift.
> Although your '*im*mobile commerce' vision is rather appealing, and is
> almost certain to take-off in the couch potato market segment, I'm not
sure
> I'd bet my business on the revenue streams you'd get from that.
The "couch potato market segment"? Tell me, who * doesn't* flake out on the
divan now and again?
Look, I'm not telling anybody to bet their business on chiclet-keyboard
interfaces to mail-order houses, esp. given my own ignominious defeat in
this very arena. It has, however, been noted that established mail-order
businesses have gone to the web rather smoothly and safely compared to the
dot-coms, because it was a very natural extension of how they do business
already. And a website is, for many of them, not too much more than
cake-frosting, not a do-or-die play. (My client put off doing a website for
well over a year because they were too busy making good money from the
orders they were getting by fax.) I'd say it's actually less of a risk for
them to go to mobile customer order-entry than to offer a full desktop web
catalog, since there's so much less content that has to be reformatted from
print catalog to HTML and then maintained in that separate, different
medium.
> Jeff Funk's earlier posting on content & subscriber revenues is very
> interesting as it highlights how this market has evolved and created so
many
> revenue streams other than plain subscriber and transaction fees. My
> interpretation of it though is that sales terminating on the handset (my
> interpretation of m-commerce) remains tiny compared with the broader
'mobile
> influenced commerce'. ....
I don't doubt that. At one time, however, "sales termination at the credit
card POS terminal" was tiny. Now it's huge. That is also m-Commerce.
Everything starts somewhere.
A myopic focus on how mobile somehow has to be like the Web is just another
case of 'fighting the last war.' Mobile is a different medium.
Initial conditioned responses to new media technologies are likely to be
wrong, and especially when the responses come from technologists. The
inventor of the phonograph thought he was inventing a medium for the
transmission of voice messages. The inventor of the telephone thought he
was inventing a medium for the transmission of music. And technologists who
came of age with computers forget that the printing press is also an
information technology (neither advanced nor obsolete, simply mature), and
should therefore be combined with even the newest technology where possible
and appropriate. Exactly how? That won't necessarily be obvious. (Wasn't
that the great Xerox PARC accidental discovery--that their attempt at a
"paperless office" generated *more* paper, not less?)
It's a rare innovation that succeeds without a backward glance. Most of the
successful ones succeed because they end up tightly bolted to a good
established moneymaker. You want to a revenue stream you can bet on? Go
find a real, existing one, and earn your own piece of it by supplying
convenience, cost-savings, value. And shoot your sales reps before they get
even three syllables into the word "revolution."
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
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Received on Tue Nov 20 11:50:48 2001