Slashdot discussion on an article about things mobile phones will make obsolete. I made the same prediction in 2006 in the context of an article by Tomi Ahonen.
Mobility
2
Jan 09
Instant messaging and SMS
Another service which tries to bridge IM and SMS. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be incredibly hard to provide a good user experience at scale. SMS is mostly asynchronous while IM is not. It becomes hard to use IM if you don’t have some sort of control over the latency of the messages, and only a very brave person would claim that they can guarantee message latencies in mobile networks. Even if you imagine for a moment that a service has the capacity required to push messages into an operator’s network at the rate in which they are generated (which is highly unlikely considering the cost), there is no guarantee that they’ll make it to the handset on the other end in time. SMS uses a store and forward process like e-mail, and shares some of the same characteristics. It is simply not a reliable medium for time sensitive communication.
25
Oct 08
SMS service accessibility
In a purely SMS based service, it goes without saying that the end users should be able to reach the service reliably via the same medium. Making that happen isn’t very easy. At MyToday, most of our approx. 4 million users interact with our services via SMS. It is through the usual short codes and virtual numbers, more commonly called long codes. Long codes are 10 digit numbers similar to our phone numbers and make it cheaper for end users to reach us and are more popular. It’s understandable as most people wouldn’t want to spend Rs. 3 sending an SMS to a short code, especially if a service involves sending lots of messages.
Our growth has been mostly via word of mouth. So, when users like our service and want to tell their friends and family about it, having a non-changing long code is very important. But, it’s something we haven’t been able to ensure. Not because of lack of effort, but due to circumstances beyond our control. All short and long codes are owned by operators (much like our phone numbers) and leased to service providers. Though our services are opt-in, our long codes have been blocked multiple times by the operator we had leased it from. I’m not sure what the reason for the latest blockage is or if it has even been communicated to us, but, it is sometimes because of complaints from a few users that we are sending them unsolicited messages.
The obvious question is how that can happen when we claim to be an opt-in service. The problem is with the churn that happens in the operator’s user base. If a user with a particular phone number belonging to operator A subscribes to our service, and then migrates to different operator B, stops paying his bill etc. after some time, he stops being a customer of operator A. The phone number will now be assigned to a new subscriber by operator A within a short period of time. This new user hasn’t subscribed to our service and thinks we are spamming him when we continue to send messages. The ideal solution is that service providers need to know when a phone number is assigned to a different user, but there haven’t been reliable ways of getting that information. With churn rates at 6-7% among GSM operators as per an article from Mint, and overall churn rates of 3-5% (a number quoted by a speaker at MoMo Monsoon), and with the growth rates we are seeing in India, I imagine the operators are under pressure to reuse numbers as and when they become available, but there has to be a better way to share that information.
The partial graph above shows what impact a blockage can have. Our then popular long code 9845298452 was blocked some time late on 8th Oct or early in the day on 9th Oct and our users could not reach us at all and there was a massive fall in incoming messages. We got a new number immediately and started using that. One of the first things we did was to inform all our users that they could stop receiving our messages if they so wished using the new number. Some of them did and that is what the spike on the 16th represents. As we are an opt-in service, users opting out is generally a very small number compared to our overall user base, but something they can always do. Now, we are actively losing new users as they can’t reach our service using the popular long code. We have to start the process of making new long codes popular among our user base from scratch, not to mention handling all the support requests.
This may stop being an issue once number portability comes in, as users will retain a number once they get it and re-assignment of phone numbers won’t happen that often. The real solution though is better regulation and dispute resolution mechanisms. There is no incentive for operators to create an ecosystem which promotes innovation in the mobile space and neither is it their job. Unless they are forced to do it, smaller players who are trying to build services that end users want will spend more time dealing with issues like these and engineering their way around the latest obstacle rather than focusing their energy only on what is good for the user. Till that day comes, the cat and mouse games continue!
3
Sep 06
On the invincibility of mobile phones
Communities dominate brands recently posted about the drastic fall in the sale of iPods, and also made a very strong argument that the iPod’s era of dominance is done. The comments are brutal and Tomi Ahonen took some serious flak for that post.
I came across this post via Vinu’s blog, and like him thought about the Indian connection first, because that’s what we do. I think all the people who dismiss the mobile phone as a jukebox/music device miss some very important points…
The power of default
“The quality of audio on the phones suck. iPods are so much better”, is a common argument. But, the vast majority of people don’t give a damn about the quality of audio. If a default player is available on their phone they’ll happily use it. Most people will not buy a separate device in search of better quality, and not always because they don’t want it. It’s because they just aren’t aware of the alternatives and the pain isn’t big enough to motivate a search for something better. We’ve seen that time and again in the past. It’s the reason why many of Microsoft’s products are as popular as they are, or the reason why Google is paying companies like Dell hundreds of millions of dollars to control the default home page on new machines. It is exactly why Google raised fears of anti-competitive behaviour when it was announced that Microsoft may make MSN search the default in IE 7, even though it would be easy to select a different search engine.
iPod? What’s that?
One of the other objections raised was that even though the phones have the ability to play music, almost nobody uses it, instead opting for jukeboxes like the iPod. So, it’s pointless to compare a mobile phone and an iPod.
In a country like India, while it may be true that not many people are using mobile phones to listen to music in the form of MP3 files, it is only because of the lack of options in getting the music onto the phone. Companies like Hutch have started selling full length songs, and once this becomes more popular, I’m sure that more people will be listening to music on phones than specialised jukeboxes. The concept of a different device to listen to music isn’t even popular in India. The digital divide has ensured that. With the exception of mobile phones, it’s not just a divide, it’s a full blown chasm. The cost of these devices hasn’t helped either. I can easily imagine a taxi driver who has no clue what an iPod is downloading and listening to the latest songs on his mobile phone. All this is without considering the usage of FM radio features of mobile phones, which is definitely more than that of iPods if I can go by what I’ve seen around me.
Also, I don’t think the argument of phones taking over the market share of iPods or similar devices is even applicable to India as there never was a huge market for the latter anyway. Like in many other cases we’ve skipped an entire generation of technology and are moving directly towards usage of mobile phones for consumption of music.
While on the topic of the invincibility of mobile phones, I thought it would be interesting to capture the different product families under threat…
- Music players – Not really applicable to India as it was never really a player to be under threat. But, worldwide the threat is only going to increase in the future.
- Cameras – Again, cameras on the mobile phone are not ready for prime time, but they are getting there very soon. Maybe people like my brother, who recently upgraded to his third digital camera in two years won’t find the quality offered by phone cameras good enough for a long time, but I don’t think it’ll be an issue with me. My thumb rule has always been that if the quality of the image is good at a resolution which is the same as that of my desktop monitor, then the camera that took the image is good (enough). And I expect to see phones getting there very soon.
- Credit Cards – Already happening. Mobile payment solutions are cropping up everywhere.
- Watches – Didn’t see that coming did you? I’ve been noticing around me that many people have stopped wearing watches, the most common reason being that with a mobile phone at hand, a watch is unnecessary. I stopped wearing a watch more a year ago, but that was mainly because I spent a lot of time in front a computer, but always having a phone around has played its part too.
- Alarm Clocks – As Tomi mentions in his post, 72% of respondents in a poll said they use their mobile phone as an alarm clock exclusively. Not sure if this is a big enough ‘product category’ to be included here though.
- Audio recorders/Dictaphones – I’ve used my jukebox to record a lot of audio. I guess the mobile phone can do this equally well, or more easily, with their bluetooth support.
- Paper tickets - Not required when technology makes it easier to buy, sell and authenticate tickets.
- Goto device for information – Not exactly a product family, but the PC, books etc. will be replaced when the search engines get their acts together on the mobile phone. Of course, this does not include research of any kind. It includes the ‘need some information and need it now’ kind of moments.
There are a bunch of other products which can fit into this list merely because they can fit into/live in a small hand held electronic device, but it doesn’t make sense to add them here. Do you know of any others that can be added here?