Dark side of the moon?
by Vince Kadar
The sixth track on Pink Floyd’s Darks Side of the Moon album is entitled “Money”.
Money drives economies, money drives purchasing decisions, and as Pink Floyd stated: “Grab the cash with both hands and make a stashâ€. CNN recently reported on text messaging charges, and adjustment on pricing (increasing), that has taken place, over the past year. Highlights of the CNN report highlights how North American operators have raised the price of SMS messaging from what used to be 10 cents per message to 15 cents per message, as well as charging a premium to the message if the consumer is messaging to a foreign number (more than likely to maintain their margin of the message that need to make on the basic message). That would equate to roughly 1 cent for every 8 to 10 characters (depending if the operator is CDMA or GSM). Operators are set to rake in $52 Billion worth of text messaging revenues in the U.S. this year.
We have seen over time how the consumer products industry have shrunk the size of products that we have purchased while maintaining their price points to maintain healthy margins. Toothpaste is just one whereby a tube, 250ml, was at a price point of 99 cents 20 years ago is currently still 99 cents but for a 125ml. The packaging looks almost the same; just half the size.
Could the mobile operators price text messaging comparatively? If I sent a text message “BRTâ€, meaning “Be Right There†since I used less than half of 160 characters that I am charged appropriately. Maybe I’m charged 3 cents for the message, still a healthy margin, since I’m only using 3 characters from the available 160 (120 in CDMA) characters.
From the astounding revenue figure this year alone, I think Pink Floyd had it right from the thinking of the operator: “Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pieâ€!
What are you thoughts?
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