Welcome to the third part of the mobile messaging coverage. Today, John White of Portio Research Ltd will be visiting here. If you missed the previous parts you can follow these links: Part I and Part II.
Let's welcome John:
Hi John. Thank you for coming back, how are you? :)
Hi Xen, thanks a lot, I’m doing great thanks.
Today, you're going to share some insights about the mobile messaging futures
Yes! Here’s what Portio Research has to say about it:
Many in the mobile industry feel that MMS, mobile email and mobile IM have somehow failed as messaging platforms and that SMS, though it seems to pain people to admit it, is the only truly successful mass market messaging format. However, this is not the case, while SMS is a truly staggering mass market phenomenon, these other messaging formats have not failed, they have simply failed to match up to the runaway success of SMS.
For some reason SMS has become a ‘dirty word’ for some people, analysts don’t like to talk about it, mobile operators don’t like to focus on it, and no-one treats SMS like it’s sexy any more. It’s as though SMS is “old” technology, as if it no longer deserves any credit, it should be consigned to the history books. This is crazy. Worldwide, SMS still accounts for approximately 75 to 80% of all non-voice service revenues, SMS traffic volumes are still growing at a breath taking pace and as worldwide subscriber numbers climb from 2.5 Bn to 4.5 Bn over the next 5 or 6 years, SMS is the only non-voice service likely to gain widespread acceptance among the majority of these new mobile users.
Worldwide, SMS traffic hit 1 trillion messages in 2005, and that figure is set to reach over 3 trillion by the end of 2011. Set against that backdrop, of course other messaging formats look small. But MMS has not failed; worldwide MMS traffic touched 14 billion messages in 2005 and is forecast to pass 115 billion by the end of 2011. These are not small numbers, and while they are only a fraction of the volume that SMS has achieved, MMS should still be seen as a great success.
So if MMS is a success, why has it not replaced SMS?
MMS has not failed; the industry had totally unrealistic expectations of MMS in the first place. MMS was hyped as the natural replacement for SMS, but that shows a misunderstanding of SMS and the reasons why SMS has been such a big hit worldwide. SMS owes its success to its simplicity. It is the quickest, easiest and cheapest way for two people to communicate a short and simple message and as such it serves as an extremely useful communications option that is affordable universally, even among some of the lowest income groups of society.
MMS, on the other hand, has been misunderstood from the start. MMS should be seen more as a mobile entertainment service than as a messaging service. MMS is more complex and expensive than SMS, so consumers are unlikely to use MMS to communicate a simple message, when SMS does the job so quickly and easily and costs so little. MMS will always look like a failure when compared alongside SMS, yet when you consider MMS in its own right, as an entertainment application and content delivery tool, then MMS can be seen as a very popular and successful service.
Why has growth been so slow?
MMS struggled to gain ground between 2002 and 2004 primarily because the service was not fully supported and the necessary equipment was not in widespread circulation. At the time of launch, MMS-enabled handsets, with GPRS support, colour screen and camera included, were comparatively expensive, and many networks launched services amid an array of complex tariffs. MMS was often charged according to the size of the message (per-KB) which left end-users confused about costs and created the perception that picture messaging was expensive.
Further problems were caused by a lack of standardisation among handset vendors, leaving screen display for MMS messages unreliable, and a lack of signed interoperability agreements between network operators further hampered the potential growth of MMS services. Add all this together and throw in a complex user interface and it is hardly surprising MMS got off to such a slow start. The industry failed to understand that until the penetration level of MMS-capable handsets reached a certain critical mass, widespread use of the service was never going to happen.
Only now is MMS growing in popularity since all networks are fully interoperable, colour-screen cameraphones are in widespread circulation and MMS tariffs are now cheap and transparent. Compare this to SMS: worldwide there are approximately 2 BILLION SMS enabled handsets in operation, it’s cheap and easy to use, widely supported in almost every corner of the mobile world and there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of services and applications that utilise SMS as a communication medium. That is why SMS is so popular, and why MMS has taken so long to take off.
Thank you John for this interview. Wanna read more about mobile email and mobile IM?? Tune in next Sunday! :)
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