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applications – can have profound impacts. Also, some carriers re-learned an important truth – that the most fundamental, sticky, and hard-to-enter business in the mobile communications industry is, in fact, carrying the bits. Owning the access networks provides carriers with a valuable and sustainable basis for working out ways of making money in partnership with all those upstart Internet companies. Having realized that it’s not such a bad thing to be a bit-pipe, carriers have changed the question. Instead of “How can we prevent anyone else engaging with our customers?” carriers are asking themselves “How can we make money helping all these other people who have stuff our customers want?”
The mobile communications ecosystem has evolved and continues to change. The main ecological niches or roles in the environment today are: access and connectivity; hand-held devices; hand-held device operating systems; applications that provide useful services. This is a simplification: each niche contains many different species of flora and fauna; and some creatures range across the entire landscape.
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Carriers are asking themselves “How can we make money helping all these other people who have stuff our customers want?” |
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Is it all sweetness and light? Hardly. Now that the garden walls are tumbling around wireless Internet, attention will surely turn to voice services. People still like to talk to each other, and carriers still earn most of their revenue by charging for voice calls. With 3G networks, there is no technical reason why voice should not be delivered as just another over-the-top data service, but it won’t happen soon, even though devices are being shipped with multiple VoIP clients already installed. Customers can use third party services at a WiFi hotspot, but not over the 3G network. Voice is the last bit-carrier holdout.
Shows like Mobile World Congress do not define the ecosystem, but this show has become an important part of the messy self-organizing process that somehow creates a direction for this important global industry. It may seem odd that an industry that is dedicated to communication-at-a-distance
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In this environment no single sector defines the industry; no single player defines the customer experience; no single player owns the customer. Perhaps the customer is becoming a time-shared property. Perhaps customer ownership itself is simply extinct, a concept not fit to survive in this new mobile ecosystem. In any case, with the customer naming the tune more than ever before, the customer becomes the major determinant of the evolution of the mobile ecosystem. Now that’s a novelty.
This picture will evolve further as regulators deliberate and companies strategize and reassess opportunities for both vertical and horizontal integration. But perhaps the biggest factor will be the new attitude to the customer that was reflected in presentation after presentation: win customer loyalty by helping customers get access to the goodies they like.
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finds it necessary to bring together 55,000 people to meet face-to-face in one small corner of the planet, but it works. Outside their corporate shelters, in the conference halls, exhibition booths, restaurants and bars, thousands of inhabitants of the various ecological niches can work out pragmatic ways of living together.
We felt that a lot of the interesting stuff at this show lay in the area of new mobile applications and services, offering customers access to information and capabilities that just didn’t exist a few years ago –messaging, video, location, search, social networking – you know the list. You can make voice calls on these things, too, I understand.
Where do these applications live in the infrastructure? The interesting development, brought into sharp focus at this show, is that, technically, in this new mobile ecosystem, it hardly matters.
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