Ken,
If I was reading your last comments and did not know what you were talking about, I would still not know what you are talking about.
To those who might have been in that situation, let me explain i-shot's limitations:
i-mode mail does not allow binary attachments. I-melodies, as someone already mentioned, use an ASCII code scheme to send melodies.
Ken is right, DoCoMo did have to do something to compete with sha-mail, and the answer was i-shot. It is an inelegant solution which involves once uploading the picture to a server, and then appending a link to the mail which points at the picture on the server, which allows a DoCoMo customer to see the picture by clicking on the link, thereby opening a web browser, which *can* view and receive binary information.
This system also forces other carriers' customers to use special measures, such as '@shamail' to send pictures to DoCoMo customers.
On another note, Ken, while SMS is still available and still used by many customers, because it does not support binary file attachments, and because the length of mails is so short, and because I don't think there is compatibility between carriers, except between TuKa and Vodafone, and probably Tuka and au, it is definitely dying out.
Your last comment, about us being turned into TuKa by our British parent, is ridiculous. A little over a year ago we were tied with au for customers. Now we are behind. Last month we had a net loss of a little over 3,000 customers. Meaning that we definitely need to address those issues which led to the current situation. But to discount our ability to do so, as much of the media has done recently, is probably not wise: We have a good, smart team, and the seriousness of our current situation and the necessity of improving the situation, is clearly understood. Clear measures are being taken to do so, and while it may take some time, I believe that we will be in a very enviable position about two years from now, when mobile number portability becomes possible.
I used to be one, so I can't completely trash journalists, but I think that the reporting about us has been misguided. We have had a bad year. No doubt about it. But a bad year is simply that, a bad year. Au, in case you have forgotten, had several bad years before their 'miraculous' turnaround. And yet, the have more than Tuka's paltry number of customers. A company is not broken in one quarter, or even one year. Amid all of the nonsense about our demise, one important fact seems to get missed: We are among the most profitable companies in the country. The criticism of Japanese companies used to be, and often still is, that they focused on market share above all else. If having a British parent helps us with that problem, I can only see that as a plus.
Nik Frengle
Received on Mon Aug 9 07:19:29 2004