Shooting yourself in the foot is not to be recommended. But it seems to happen regularly within the mobile industry. The self-inflicted injury is almost always the result of a disconnect between the capabilities of a technology and the marketing of that technology.
Sometimes the injury can be fatal. Iridium was a brilliant technological achievement, but a marketing disaster. Stubbornly sticking to a decade-old business plan and failing to acknowledge the unexpected global success of GSM technology had fundamentally changed the market was not a good move. End of Iridium.
Japan’s cordless PHS technology has fared somewhat better. Focusing on the superior data rate capabilities of PHS compared with cellular created a market niche for PHS technology. But that niche is now threatened by the success of the cellular i-mode service and will undoubtedly disappear entirely once 3G cellular services are launched in Japan.
Or will it? Will 3G services really sweep away all other alternative technologies lying in their path? The ability of 3G technologies to deliver unprecedented functionality in the mobile data world is not in doubt. What is in doubt is the marketing.
The omens are not good. WAP is already being slated as a disappointment. Again it is not really the technology that is at fault. It is the marketing. WAP in the GSM world has been launched on circuit-switched networks rather than waiting for GPRS. The resulting long call set-up times make WAP slow and clunky. And they make it expensive.
Contrast that with the marketing of the packet-based i-mode service from NTT DoCoMo. A rich variety of content was put in place before service launch, it has affordable pricing and consistent branding. I-mode is described in the press as a “high-speed Internet access” service. A remarkable achievement for a 9.6 kilobits per second system that cannot access the full Internet.
Portraying WAP as providing the ability to surf the Internet from your mobile is a mistake. Portraying 3G in the same way is equally mistaken. But that is just what is happening. Vendors and operators alike are talking about 3G enabling the mobile Internet, or the wireless Internet for companies with a U.S. inclination.
Raising user expectations in this way could be a bad mistake. Offering the full Internet experience on a mobile terminal is not what 3G is about. Limitations on data rates and terminal displays mean the mobile environment will never compete on equal terms with broadband fixed access to the desktop. That is not the strength of 3G. The strength of 3G lies in personalized multimedia communications that can only be provided in a mobile environment.
Shooting yourself in the foot is not necessarily the end of the road. You can still hobble along on one foot with the aid of crutches. Characterizing 3G as the mobile Internet is like shooting yourself in both feet and then throwing the crutches away. The road to recovery is less certain in those circumstances.
