Carnival 151

You're right, Helen's post is extremely astute.

I dunno, Keegan's piece seemed rather weak to me.

The headline "there's no future in mobile" sounds like it's predicting the end of the mobile phone, but when you actually read the article it's just trotting out the same old vague moans that have been circulating around the mobile world for two or three years now. None of these things are new, and none of these things have stopped mobile phone sales growing every year (they'll probably shrink next year but that's due to the general economic climate). It seems she picked the headline just to grab attention, as it bore no relation to what she actually said.

She doesn't really define who she's blaming for each problem, so it's difficult to know what kind of changes she's calling for. Simply blaming the mobile world in general is meaningless, because different parts of it have totally different agendas. What manufacturers and networks and users and publishers want are all totally different, they are not on the same team, and they do not care about helping each other unless they're forced to.

The article is also shockingly naive about mobile network tariffs.

Yes, mobile tariffs are confusing, but that's because they're meant to be. The only reason tariffs exist is to prevent price comparisons, and so reduce competition among mobile networks (because competition means less money and more work for the networks). Here in Finland when phone locking was banned there were no tariffs, phone networks simply advertised a single per-minute price and you could switch to whichever one you preferred whenever you wanted to: prices went down, service quality went up, because the networks knew they had to work really hard to win customers. Once phone locking was legalised, the tariffs and packages came in and were extremely confusing and impossible to compare. In other words they were doing the job they were intended for. The phone networks openly said that they were calling for phone locking to be legalised precisely because they were "suffering" from "too much" competition.

Contracts and phone locking exist for exactly the same reason as tariffs, to make it more difficult to switch between networks and so reduce competition. The phone networks aren't there to serve mobile users, they're there to make as much money as possible as easily as possible, which means doing their best to stop people shopping around. They want to keep prices as high as possible, and they don't care if it has a negative effect on mobile users.

The article goes on to talk about the developing world being "the next billion phone users"... well, the developing world is already the majority of phone sales. For example Nokia's two biggest customers are China and India, and they sell more phones in the Middle East than in the United States. Why is she talking about it happening in the future when it's already here?

Exactly, we are living the future. See, that what i just typed was in the past. That also.

Tzer2 wrote:I dunno, Keegan's piece seemed rather weak to me.

The headline "there's no future in mobile" sounds like it's predicting the end of the mobile phone, but when you actually read the article it's just trotting out the same old vague moans that have been circulating around the mobile world for two or three years now. None of these things are new, and none of these things have stopped mobile phone sales growing every year (they'll probably shrink next year but that's due to the general economic climate). It seems she picked the headline just to grab attention, as it bore no relation to what she actually said.

She doesn't really define who she's blaming for each problem, so it's difficult to know what kind of changes she's calling for. Simply blaming the mobile world in general is meaningless, because different parts of it have totally different agendas. What manufacturers and networks and users and publishers want are all totally different, they are not on the same team, and they do not care about helping each other unless they're forced to.

The article is also shockingly naive about mobile network tariffs.

Yes, mobile tariffs are confusing, but that's because they're meant to be. The only reason tariffs exist is to prevent price comparisons, and so reduce competition among mobile networks (because competition means less money and more work for the networks). Here in Finland when phone locking was banned there were no tariffs, phone networks simply advertised a single per-minute price and you could switch to whichever one you preferred whenever you wanted to: prices went down, service quality went up, because the networks knew they had to work really hard to win customers. Once phone locking was legalised, the tariffs and packages came in and were extremely confusing and impossible to compare. In other words they were doing the job they were intended for. The phone networks openly said that they were calling for phone locking to be legalised precisely because they were "suffering" from "too much" competition.

Contracts and phone locking exist for exactly the same reason as tariffs, to make it more difficult to switch between networks and so reduce competition. The phone networks aren't there to serve mobile users, they're there to make as much money as possible as easily as possible, which means doing their best to stop people shopping around. They want to keep prices as high as possible, and they don't care if it has a negative effect on mobile users.

The article goes on to talk about the developing world being "the next billion phone users"... well, the developing world is already the majority of phone sales. For example Nokia's two biggest customers are China and India, and they sell more phones in the Middle East than in the United States. Why is she talking about it happening in the future when it's already here?

Fortunately a farmer in rural Africa doesn't need the internet to check out prices in the nearby city. Calling his second cousin who is working there is much cheaper.