Frustration Over Centralised Control
Marek Pawlowski at PMN came back from an evening seminar for the NOC and 160characters.org with some insightful conclusions regarding working with companies in the mobile value chain. You can find Marek’s post on the MEX blog.
Marek concludes…
"1) There is a considerable frustration among application developers and premium content providers when trying to bring their services to market quickly and profitably.
2) Much of this frustration is caused by the politics and culture of fear which exists within the mobile value chain. Established companies are intent on maintaining the status quo rather than helping the industry respond more effectively to customers.
3) Mobile companies are always asking themselves ‘who owns the customer?’ whereas customers are asking the industry ‘ who understands us?’ - this is the source of the fundamental disconnection between the companies driving product development and the people they expect to sell to.
4) A potential explosion in mobile data usage is being constrained by the industry’s tendency towards centralised control and could be unleashed by providing developers and users with greater freedom to design their own personalised experiences."
Having worked on many mobile projects, I can testify that all this is true. Moreover…
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Terminal (Phone) manufacturers are just as guilty as network operators. Both have tended to appear ‘arrogant’, disinterested and difficult to talk to when my clients (i.e. my customers) have tried to pitch in with new ideas. Both will usually only cooperate if you are willing to shoulder all the development risk.
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In the particular case of Nokia, it’s an anomaly that they provide such excellent technical help via Nokia Forum, great 3rd party publicity via Nokia.com/Series60.com yet tend to fail when it comes to partnering and sharing risk.
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It doesn’t matter whether you are a large blue chip company, small company, established or a startup - you will still find it difficult to interest phone OEMs and network operators.
- The dissatisfaction isn’t just with sales and marketing. It extends to support. It’s often difficult, if not impossible, to get phone and network specific problems diagnosed and fixed.
So what can be done about it? Well, not a lot. Instead, it creates opportunities for a few large very companies with large existing subscriber bases to circumvent the phone OEM/network operator as much as is possible when they won’t cooperate - as is already starting to happen with mobile services from Yahoo and Google.
Meanwhile, what Marek calls "A potential explosion in mobile data usage" is available to any network operator who is willing to invest in mobile services. If they fail to do so, a ‘power inversion’ may occur where the Internet Services companies will mainly ‘own’ customer data (images, files, messages, contacts etc.) and network operators will have compromised their centralised control.
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