On Wed, 15 Oct 2003, Sven Kilian wrote:
> Thus they have had first very good ressources to build up the
> infrastructure at an early time and become kind of first-market
> winners...
I don't buy that. They may have had more resources to get started,
but the other phone companies proved that they also had the resouces
to develop something similar to i-Mode by the very fact that they did
shortly after.
> And thats the only reason that the i-mode service is so successful as
> well.
So what you're saying is that the following had nothing to do with the
success of i-mode and i-Appli?
* Sites are easier to develop due to using a close approximation of
a widely deployed, open markup language.
* It's possible to access some "regular" web sites without needing
something in between converting between HTML and another format.
* Anybody can write an i-Appli and put it up for download without
jumping through any hoops to get it "approved."
Well, the list could go on, but you can read a book about it.
Let's face it: i-Mode works, and works pretty well, and it does a good
(or good enough) job at providing services that people want and need. If
it didn't, people would move. (This is shown by the fact that people who
wanted a camera did move when J-Phone was the only option for that.)
> I don't want to smaller the great achievements and the success of the Mobile
> Market in japan...its absolutely stunning and the world can learn from it,
> but there is a lot of hype around it, especially with NTT DoCoMo. A lot of
> great services and applications NTT DoCoMo just copied from their
> competitors J-Phone and AU. That was the case with the camera phone, the
> latest 2D code technology and many others.
I don't thing that anybody's saying that Docomo was first with
everything. But they were first with a lot of stuff, including the whole
concept itself.
As for 2D bar codes, though; who was using that before Docomo, and for
what? Docomo's had 2D bar codes in production use (as C-mode) for, what,
two years or so now?
> [Re: the German incumbent wireline provider:] The majority of ADSL
> subscribers for example goes through them. The only reason for this is
> their name and size.
I doubt that very, very much. If so, it would be the only market I've
ever seen where new providers can lay cable anywhere at will. For
wireline services, it's always been and always will be the case that the
guy who owns wire in the ground has an obvious and large advantage over
the guy who doesn't and can't.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.NetBSD.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Wed Oct 15 10:38:52 2003