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, Part II and Part III.
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 more insights about the mobile messaging futures
Yes! Here’s what Portio Research has to say about it:
Why has growth been so slow for mobile email?
Once we understand this argument, we can put mobile email into perspective. Set against an installed base of 2 billion plus SMS-capable handsets, mobile email has only just got off the starting blocks. RIM’s BlackBerry is widely accepted as the market leading device of choice for corporate executives who need reliable mobile email, yet after years of pushing these excellent devices into the market, the installed base of BlackBerry subscribers, worldwide, in mid-2006, reached only a little over 6 million. Taken alone, 6 million or more is a great success for RIM, but compared to the 2 billion souls around the world with SMS in the palm of their hands, it’s just a drop in the ocean.
Looking forward perhaps 10 or 15 years, we should see a future where email becomes the unchallenged #1 most popular form of non-verbal communication on the planet. With billions of people connected to the Internet, wired and wireless, email will surely be the messaging format that most people use, but this is unlikely to be a conscious decision on the part of the consumer. By this time, how an individual is connected to the Internet, and which messaging platform they are using won’t matter - and the user will neither know nor care how it all works. Messages - text or images, moving or still, with or without attachments, sound, colour, etc - will be sent and received by any device, any time, any place, with or without wires, and telecommunications service providers, if they are smart, will not burden consumers by even trying to explain how it all works.
But getting us to that vision of the future from where we are now will take some time, and there will doubtless be some barriers to cross along the way. To move towards a point where mobile email becomes the mass market messaging format of choice will require absolutely seamless integration of competing technological standards, in an industry that so far has a poor track record on standardisation. For mobile email to start reaching deep into the mass market we need widespread penetration of email-enabled devices, we need to see simple, transparent pricing and we clearly need effortless interoperability between telecoms operators, not only mobile network operators but also wireline operators and the broader Internet community as a whole.
So it may be a while before consumers all use mobile email, but what about the enterprise sector?
In the short term, mobile email solutions such as BlackBerry will remain popular tools with company executives, and many operators around the world are promoting their own email solutions, and this should slowly help the sector to grow. But as we learned from MMS, it takes a long time for handset penetration to build a critical mass of users, and a long time for a service to penetrate the consumer masses who are more price-sensitive than corporate users.
Further hampering the take up of mobile email in the enterprise environment, corporate IT departments are unclear about how to integrate mobility in the broader world of the corporate IT infrastructure. Should mobility be bought with other IT and telecom services from long standing, trusted suppliers, or separately, directly from the network? Should corporations equip large sections of the workforce with mobile devices, possibly costing a hefty slice of the IT budget, or can companies tap into the devices these individuals already own? If using their own devices, who should pay the bill and how does the corporation control network security? Corporations are understandably concerned about making these decisions, and so far no clear precedent has been set.
Again this presents an opportunity for SMS, and a problem for mobile email. While big companies can afford complete mobility solutions, for many small and medium sized enterprises that simply is not an option. In mature markets such as Europe and North America, the vast majority of employees already have an SMS-enabled device in their pockets. Solutions are available to offer some email functionality to SMS, such as copy, back-up, archive, forward, auto-divert, out-of-office reply and so on. If enterprises could buy into these solutions from network operators at a fraction of the cost of replacing all those handsets, many SMEs might find that SMS has an affordable place in the corporate communications infrastructure, at least for a few years while the industry hammers out the technical barriers to cheap, widespread mobile email for all.
So mobile email has a strong future, but it would be a mistake to expect it to replace SMS for many years yet, probably the best part of a decade. Mobile email will continue to grow year-on-year and big corporations will start deploying large scale mobile email solutions as time goes by, but mobile email for the consumer mass market remains some years away. Hundreds of millions of email-enabled devices need to penetrate the market first, alongside cheap and easy-to-use services, and technical issues around standardisation need to be ironed out before they have a chance to put people off. Remember ‘you never get a second chance to make a good first impression’.
And where does that leave mobile IM?
Yet again we find it’s pretty much the same story for mobile IM, plus or minus a few subtle differences. Again mobile IM requires market maturity to make a big impression on the messaging industry globally. Hundreds of millions of IM-enabled handsets need to penetrate the market, interoperability agreements need to be in place and operators need to work together to ensure standardisation and the removal of technical barriers. Much of the promise around mobile IM lies in the argument that hundreds of millions of individuals already use IM services on their PCs, and these people are likely to switch effortlessly to using IM on their mobile handsets instead.
While this may eventually happen, this theory relies on a number of factors. For one, maybe these people use IM on their PCs because they sit in front of a PC all day anyway, so that’s unlikely to change. Secondly, IM on the mobile handset needs to be a perfect replica of the desktop experience, or better, in order to attract users away from a cheap wireline broadband connection to a more expensive wireless connection. Facilitating this experience will mean network operators, handset vendors and IM heavyweights such as AOL, Yahoo and MSN working closely together to ensure standardisation of handset display configuration and so on. Finally, true IM requires presence awareness in order to function as it does in the desktop environment. For operators worldwide to deploy fully IMPS (Instant Messaging and Presence Services) compliant IM services and have those service fully interoperable around the globe will take some time, and until that happens, without presence awareness, IM offers little more utility to end users than good old SMS, which everyone already has and already knows how to use.
As markets move forwards mobile IM is likely to gain increasing popularity in certain countries, such as the US and some big Asian nations, where desktop IM is already popular. For hardcore users IM is likely to be cheaper than SMS, but in strong SMS markets, such as Europe, operators will keep SMS prices low and IM prices less competitive. Cannibalisation will inevitably happen at some stage, once all-IP based networks penetrate the mass market and IMPS improves the functionality of IM, but until then SMS is likely to continue to wear the crown.
Thank you John for this interview, it was VERY insightful! :)
Tune in next Sunday for the my next visitor!
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