The failure of i-Mode and our expectations of old…

I came across an article from almost exactly a year ago on the UK tech website The Register with a comment about the failure of i-Mode.

The reason that I find it interesting is that my undergraduate dissertation was on the “Socio-economic and technical aspects of 3G”. I argued that mobile video calling was going to fail due to lack of demand and the UK licences for 3G were very expensive -the auction structure meant that the 5 licences sold for about £22Billion. (Justification by the economists of Oxford University can be found here)

At the time of the auctions (late 1999, early 2000), there were many technical journals (such as IEEE Personal Communications, IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications etc.) that were full of tremendous promises of data rates for UMTS and WCDMA and CDMA2000 and also for EDGE. The new bandwidths available would transform our mobile world.

I suggest that our world has not been transformed by new mobile transmission capabilities**. We are at the stage now where we can get the wireless bandwidth out of our mobile devices and we still use them for texting and voice calls. Even during my dissertation there were cries of “Where is the ‘Killer’ App?”.

My opinion is that the killer application is the one that brings groups of devices together and a user has their capabilities at their disposal in the sort of way that makes them more than the sum of their parts. There needs to be two conditions for this to happen though: i) users need to have a collection of devices, and ii) these devices need a common platform or a common application.

As drastic as this may seem, I think that until these conditions are met, the non-Japanese cultures will be texting and voice-calling and services such as i-Mode will continue to fail.

**Note: An important point here is that the focus is on the transmission capabilities – not the ‘gadget’ quality of the device. There are some tremendous bits of kit out there masquerading as telephones – with cameras, music and video players, games machines and so on. Not one of these applications has come close to generating the kind of revenue for operators that texting does.

The UK Mobile Operators (A brief history)

There are five cellular/mobile operators in the UK: Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile, O2, and 3. The first four hold licences to operate GSM (2G) services and UMTS (3G) services; 3 hold a licence to operate UMTS services.

Here is the quick version (try to keep up!):

3 are owned by Hutchison; before 3 started trading, Hutchison had previously owned and founded Orange. Hutchison sold Orange in 1994 to Mannesmann AG.
Vodafone are part of Vodafone Group, who were founded as part of Racal Telecom in 1983 – becoming Vodafone properly in 1991. They bought Mannesmann in 1994 but had to sell off the Orange part due to the regulation of competition; France Telecom now own Orange and are using its strong brand identity for other parts of its business.
T-Mobile is a mobile network operator that is a subsidiary of the German Deutches Telekom. T-Mobile bought the previous mobile operator, One2One in 2001.
O2 was formed from BT Cellnet (the result of a demerger from UK telecoms operator BT). O2 (then known as mmO2) was purchased in 2006 by Spanish telecoms operator Telefonica, which has since used the O2 brand as a catch-all for other services (much like Orange/FT).

So:

• Orange – France Telecom (France)
• T-Mobile – Deutches Telekom (Germany)
• O2 – Telefonica (Spain)
• Vodafone – Vodafone Group (UK)
• 3 – Hutchison Whampoa (China)

A little more detail to follow.

Emerging Markets

An article on Emerging Markets by Neil Clavin, in Vodafone’s online magazine Receiver, highlights how important the non-Western populations are (if that is the right term) to the mobile operators, device manufacturers, and general technology presence in these nations.

This is a fascinating subject to me as I am fully entrenched in the usage, and research, of mobile devices as an enhancement to my life, or someone that has a lifestyle similar to me (a young professional, technology literate, certain amount of disposable cash – essentially a relatively luxury lifestyle in world terms). It is clear that is not the only viewpoint to have!

The article also links to avery interesting presentation by Jan Chipchase of Nokia entitled “Literacy, Communication & Design“. Here is a video of the accompanying talk at the LIFT ‘07 Conference:

{A Powerpoint version of the slides can be found here}

Thoughts on Nokia’s Strategy

Two interesting developments for the company were the closure of the device plant in Bochum and the move to acquire rights to the Symbian platform. The former is ostensibly down to a row over government subsidy but perhaps it can be interpreted as a sign that Nokia is strategically repositioning itself for in the long term. The Sybian acquisition is evidence of this as it is clear that Nokia is not happy with being the world-leading producer of mobile devices. Perhaps the device market is seen as a difficult market in the future with expensive device development…

That brings us to shades of old battle between IBM and Microsoft; hardware versus platform. Nobody wants to be stuck in the hole that IBM found themselves back in the day. This time however we have a number of candidates vying for that all-important “platform of the masses” status, with MS Windows, Google’s Android, and Symbian as the main players (there others, like Linux variants such as Maemo).