Recall in my post “Is Text Messaging Terminal?” earlier this week I presented the first aspects of my views on the pressures of multimodal messaging, the “buzz companies” in the “Voice SMS” field and the challenge they will undoubtedly face in trying to topple text as a messaging methodology.

It prompted a flight of comments here at Mobile Messaging 2.0, as well as at my personal blog, www.mobilepointview.com . Some opinion-ators got quite excited anticipating converged messaging. Some mistakenly thought that I was anticipating the end of texting. All good stuff…but here’s where I really stand.

The Great Pretenders
The notion that voice SMS, or even an eventual converged messaging, offerings are the vanguard of a messaging revolution causing a tsunami shift in how messaging is accomplished is too much for me to swallow. I drive down to the “putting people first” philosophy of technical interfacing, and from my commercial experience, I think “talk & listen” is an inferior interface to “type & read.”

Granted, the key strokes required for “talk & listen” are naturally fewer than typing a message. Assuming that you didn’t have a telephone number in your phone it would require approximately 12 strokes in N. America, along with say a maximum of 30 seconds of “talk messaging.” Seems like a time and ease-of-use saver as opposed to the 172 if you maximized your text characters. For you global citizens, to send that same “zoom talky” to the UK from the US, you’ve keyed in 15 strokes vs 175 in the maximum message. Advantage: talk messaging.

But on the recipient’s side, the dynamic is quite different. Sure, zoom talky provides the emotive quality of voice, and the resonance connection of humanity. But I view messaging as a “snack shot.” A momentary occurrence. A touch point. Nothing more than that.

That’s why I think text has had universal appeal and developed global mass adoption. I get enough long winding voice messages. There isn’t enough micro-coordination within the fragmented temporal demands of leaving a coherent voice message. In simple words, people are distracted while they talk. They don’t distill their thoughts. They ramble. Context is everything even in the brief, but seemingly long period of listening for 30 seconds. Text typing focuses the mind if it’s important information. Or, it’s just a lark, short and sweet.

Text storage and access is superior to talk storage. Just consider having to listen to a message every time you want to access it. (Granted after the first three to five times you’ve probably memorized the content. That’s one of the biggest challenges of voice mail that the iPhone is elegantly addressing through visual icons.) But accessing text is a simple scroll and scan. Huge time savings and convenience. To listen takes ten times more time. To read requires a moment’s glance. Advantage: Texting

Carrier Independence & Ping Pong
How is a thirty second “zoom talky” materially different from a call and leaving a voice message? Just because it is possible to send a voice packet absent an interchange with your target, does that make it significantly more valuable? After all the entire objective here is communication. An intercourse of ideas, connection, demands or needs, not a drive by shooting or playing tag at the personal level. Where is the value advantage in the substitutability of talk messaging over texting? And what of the “ping pong effect” of messaging? One leads to another, then another, etc. “Listening” layers on additional bulk, which essentially kills the ping pong phenomenon. Why not just have a “talking” conversation?

Some pose that talk messaging, because it is IP based enables the solution to be “carrier independent.” They argue it’s cheaper and technically simpler—therefore it is better. It’s a closer step to seamless exchange a la the web model with multiple modes of access and use. Wonderful notion that. Has the world recently become fully “off deck” operational? Without a line of sight to revenue the carriers will hardly embrace that solution, no matter how many adjacent SNS (social networking services) like Twitter arise. It’s akin to a news hole in a newspaper from the operator perspective.

A lot of fledgling firms dream of success in the mobile market pursuing the “carrier independent” model. Their naivety is that there is an option that can be pursued with the carriers as a “partner.” It begs the question whether these internet centric companies believe that the way to success on the internet was through ISPs. That’s not the type of partnership that created success for the likes of Google or Yahoo! Only other tectonic plates can move the carriers in this world. Mobile network operators are the rails here, and you have to ensure you fit their gauge and their game.

Mobile email didn’t kill SMS
No media kills another. It may alter it, but it doesn’t kill it. TV didn’t kill radio. DVDs didn’t kill going to the movies. SMS didn’t kill voice. Voice SMS won’t displace anything. I recognize there is likely to be localized pockets of demand for voice SMS in regions around the globe, but it is not going to be toppling SMS as a globally adopted phenomenon-remember 3 TRILLION messages a year and still growing. Especially since voice SMS is primarily a client solution, or requires an infrastructure installment. This is a critical point since there is no standardization surrounding clients, and no regulation of the solution by the mobile industry’s central body, the GSM Association, or other standards bodies such as 3GPP or 3GPP2. This is a critical, yet often overlooked point in the web centric discussions. Global standards ensure global adoption, and drive ease of interoperability. Without the interoperability piece agreed through the standards such efforts will not move beyond the dream.

Common Commercial Practices
Standards drive a book of common business processes, aka, efficiencies. The success of SMS is as much about the standard business and commercial processes which are the under layers established by GSM operators—the defacto global standard. This may seem like an insiders’ discussion, but SMS was commercially interoperable in the mid 90s through an easy bureaucratic filing with the advent of the AA 19 addendum to the IR-21s exchanged by operators. What’s that, you ask? You’ve never heard of these things? (You must be in the US) The IR 21 is the commercial format document exchanged between GSM mobile network operators enabling the commercial and technical means for voice roaming to occur. It is the common commercial document exchanged between MNOs. The AA 19 is the SMS texting component to that. It provides for commercial charging principals, such as termination fees to be exchanged between network operators thus guaranteeing the delivery of text messages. Does such a compact exist for the likes of voice SMS or multi-modal messaging? Nope.

Other Observed Obstacles
Last of the significant obstacles is the carrier’s own (limited) capabilities. Multiple access or new modal messaging such as Voice SMS, only creates islands of services in their portfolio. Yes, they have been an accomplice to the problem of multi-platform messaging islands being created without bridges. To start assuming–or demanding–that there needs to be connectivity and interoperability between these platforms is like saying “we should be able to fly between the islands,” without ever looking to build a boat or a bridge. In the early days of scale SMS texting–circa mid 90s–operators provided unlimited texting to their subscribers. To encourage usage? No, the dirty little secret was their billing systems weren’t in place to track every SMS event. So they have a history of playing all sides.
Even now the carriers are creating consumer conundrums by offering “unlimited text” and “unlimited data” packages. How the consumer will choose one over the other will also contribute to this challenge. Affluent technoscenti users will choose data to enable multiple access points (text, mobile web, email, IM, Twitter) mass consumers are inclined to use text alone. So the operators have opened up access without a full billing and clearing solution in place. Until they can identify and capture the revenue with reliability, the islands will remain unconnected. Advantage text, but stay tuned.

Texting Reigns Supreme
In my view, the lure of seamless integration of the multi-modal mix, resulting in converged deliverability is the Holy Grail that has yet to be discovered. Too many pieces are missing from the expedition to map it and successfully find it. Until all the aspects of the value chain are aligned including consumer experience, standardization, commercial processes, billing, clearing and networks fully based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) technology, in my view texting reigns supreme.