Gerhard,
I agree, I don't think that L-Mode is a fair comparison to Minitel. I think
that when you make comparisons, Minitel and imode are more appropriate.
And though (according to what Natsuno said a few months ago) the income from
imode last year was ~ 80 billion USD (total, not just DoCoMo's share), the
usage of Minitel and its income, to this day (at ~500MM USD) is more along
the lines of what could be termed a mass market service.
As far as usage figures for Minitel go, there were in 1997 6MM terminals -
but really, everyone uses them, and has used them for years.
And even though that number is down to 4.8MM now, they are still used by
every person in France to some degree (banks, post offices, government
agencies all have them).
So, at the end of the day, its difficult to compare Minitel and L-Mode as it
never had the full backing of the telecom, and did not offer a unique needed
service. Who knows, if imode was not first, you might have seen some
success in L-Mode, but understanding the Japanese keitai culture, I think it
would have been short-lived with the advent of imode.
Mark
On 5/14/03 11:50, "Gerhard Fasol" <fasol@eurotechnology.com> wrote:
>
> For a customer we did quite a bit of work on Lmode.
>
> Actually you can't compare the impact of Minitel and
> Lmode: when we did the work (July 2002) Lmode had
> about 150,000 paying subscribers, while Minitel at it's
> peak had 20 million Minitel users, about 100 times more,
> about 4 million French people used Minitel for banking
> (I am not sure how many still do).
>
> In 2000, France Telecom collected about US$ 610 million in
> Minitel fees - I doubt there is much on Lmode, my estimate
> is: 150,000 x 300YEN x 12 month = US$ 4 million/year.
>
> Gerhard
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Gerhard Fasol, PhD Eurotechnology Japan K. K.
> fasol_at_eurotechnology.com http://www.eurotechnology.com/
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Received on Wed May 14 19:11:45 2003