It’s not About Cost, It’s About Want
by Ewan Spence
Imran’s already highlighted the relative cost of SMS bandwidth last week, but I do want to touch on it again. The summary - that the raw cost of sending 160 characters is completely at odds with the cost that the customer actually pays - shouldn’t be that surprising. The first rule of business is to get as much money as the market can take, and the current SMS pricing is clearly something the market is happy to pay, in ever increasing numbers. But as for a higher per text price? Not going to happen.
Many years ago, the introduction of multimedia messaging (MMS) in the UK saw the priced fixed at 40p per message, four times that of an SMS. The rationale, that sending a picture or a sound clip was a lot more information dense and convenient and special than the 160 characters of a text made sense in that context, but put into the real world, the cost of an MMS, coupled with poor cross platform and cross network capability, killed it in the minds of many.
In the struggle to find a new form of messaging (and the implicit goal of being able to create another cash cow just like SMS), the networks seem to be avoiding one thing. The majority of their users are probably completely happy with the messaging options they have. The amount of education the networks would have to do is huge. Trying to spring a new system for profit is not going to happen. Any new system has to be wanted, and I don’t see an appetitive at the moment for anything new.
We have SMS for phone to phone, the business users have their push email and blackberries, and the geeks have whatever XML tools they can put together. Is there seriously space for anything that’s not based on current tech to make a showing? Or is it all about the presentation – after all Twitter is nothing more than SMS with slick presentation.
