Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Time to say goodbye to texting
What are the advantages of SMS, also known as texting, that drove it to worldwide unbelievable success?- It is easy and immediate, although it is asynchronous
- It is dirty cheap, much less than a voice call
What kills me is that the mobile operators are taking away #2!! Today Verizon raised the price of a single text to 20 cents, following Sprint (mind you foolish Europeans, it is both for sending and receiving message ;-) Just a bit more than a year ago, the price was 10 cents, then they raised to 15 cents, now it is 20 cents. A 100% increase in a year...
Are they insane??
Maybe. They are simply pushing everybody to buy a bundle. If you are a bundle user, you are going to send a lot more text messages (who cares, they use zero bandwidth), which will be sent to a lot of people. Some of them (most?) will be receivers without a bundle: THEY will pay double (a bundle...). Evil.
But they might be pushing towards the wrong one. In a short time, people won't buy SMS bundles, they will buy a data plan and they will use mobile email instead. They are just accelerating the transition, pushing to make themselves a dumb pipe...
Time to say goodbye to texting, at least in the US.
Posted by Fabrizio at 12:11
1 Comments:
Gabriele Barni said...
i am not an expert about the U.S. situation but here in Europe it is very strange ...
SMS are old .. but they are always the best technology to send a simple plain text message for communicate something or do a little chat.
It is the best technology for the simply reason that MMS are deprecated, they don't work fine, and are expansive ... and if someone have domesticated this technology he will question himself "why pay a lot use a f*cking limited email message?"
(MMS are born with the cameraphone, with the convinction of the ICT society to send "postcards" with a mobile phone... and is clear to all that : is not so... )
btw since i have my bought the iphone my sms are decreased of the 80% .. .now i use also here in italy always EMAIL (over IMAP - gmail) . When i am out i prefer send an email more then a SMS. ( my Mobile Email are increased of the 1500%, and is amazing more funny ). (keep in mind that here in italy only a few people use Email on they mobile.. )
i have studied many research about the use of the mobile phone technology in my University (cattolica milano) where i study comunication .. and i believe that in the future the only way to stop the SMS killerapp .. is just the old email ;)
