Skype on your handset? Operators don’t think so
During my Monday morning RSS catchup, I came across Mobile Today’s report of O2 and Orange throwing their toys out of the pram in discussions with Nokia over the inclusion (or not) of Skype on the new N97.
O2 and Orange responded furiously to Nokia’s declaration that it will equip its upcoming flagship Nseries device, the N97, with Skype. If the row is not resolved the two operators may refuse to stock the N97 – or any future Nseries handsets containing Skype – unless Nokia strips out the Skype client.
This level of reticence towards services that invade their territory isn’t surprising, but it’s unfortunate. Who loses out by useful services like Skype being removed from the devices? It’s the customer.
It reminds me of the music industry battle; It was ten years ago already that Napster surfaced from a university student’s dorm, changing the landscape for the music industry ever since by showing music consumers that there was a new way (legit or not) of accessing more music than what your local music chain could offer.
The music industry has been grappling with this hot potato ever since; rather than going with the flow and finding ways to work with peer-to-peer networks in the early days, it opted for a lengthy legal game of Whack-a-mole with developers who were much smarter than them. It’s only in the past year or two that services like Spotify and Last.fm have started making creative use of the web to distribute music legally. Would users have gone on to use illegitimate services if no one had managed to put a business plan together to do it all above board? I suspect so.
To put it simply, once the penny drops, there’s no going back.
This is the crossroad the mobile industry is at; Through devices like the iPhone, the N-Series Nokia range and many other new phones, we’re getting an inkling of how customisable our gadgets are. Need to call a friend abroad? Grab Skype. Fancy using a Twitter app instead of SMS? Grab it from the App Store.
Of course, this freaks out the operators who want to be “more than just a bit pipe”, who up until recently received a cut of most mobile activity. And it’s fair that they need to ensure their revenue in order to stay in business, that’s just common sense. However, excessive greed may help increase the revenue-per-head in the short term, but in the long term, customers will see right through this ploy and find an operator who’s less likely to put a spanner in their creative works. Whether it’s Skype, off-portal mobile web access or having some flexibility in available tariffs, customers are (slowly but surely) becoming more empowered. Customers will only accept a less-than-full-featured phone for so long before they review their choice of operator.
The area where operators can build true value for their users is customer care; provide prompt and responsive service when something goes wrong, be helpful rather than obscure in helping your users choose a tariff and device that suits them. Users will love you. Nothing can replace the good feeling that accompanies a smooth transaction when the new shiny phone arrives. Happy customers is what makes a business, isn’t it?
[Via PaidContent]
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March 2nd, 2009 at 11:31 am
I agree with you Vero – the networks *should* be dumb pipes. People don’t want locked off services on their phones that only people on the same network can use. They want open services that allow them to share and communicate with others.
Customers want good service and a good connection at a good price. They shouldn’t be holding customers back in any way. As the market for mobile data becomes more advanced they’ll just lose their customers to their competitors.
March 2nd, 2009 at 2:18 pm
It’s hard to sympathise with the networks given the constant rip-off that is SMS:
http://gthing.net/the-true-price-of-sms-messages/
It costs 4 times as much to send data via SMS as it does to send data to the Hubble telescope:
http://www.physorg.com/news129793047.html
And since SMSs are actually implemented in the control protocol the phones used to regularly contact base stations anyway, the costs are practically zero:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=433536&cid=22219254
March 5th, 2009 at 10:28 am
@MartinSFP: I agree, the carriers should concentrate on being dumb pipes, and good ones, with transparent pricing. If people understood what they were paying for and how to control their bills, they’d be less frightened to use them. If the operators want make more money out of providing content, they WOULD if their content was compelling. Most people seem to use their portals because there’s not much choice, either because rivals are blocked or pricing differentials make people willing to put up with crappy carrier services.
@Carl: once, SMS was purely a by-product of the GSM protocol, but when volume increased they had to bolt on additional capacity purely to handle consumer SMSs! However, the true cost of an SMS is near zero, but the carriers have formed a cartel to cross-charge each other so that they can justify charging their customers for them. The same cross-charging process also allows them to screw customers over with roaming charges and even cross-network calls.