Crunch Gear had an interesting post – somehow, they are expecting mobile IM to go mainstream next year. Somehow, this seems a bit farfetched. Mobile IM will take at least 2-3 years or more to become popular.
IM vs SMS
IM is usually seen as an SMS competitor. Taking this viewpoint, there is only a single reason why IM will become popular, which is also the reason it won’t. The reason is cost. People are used to paying high prices for sending SMS messages. With over two trillion messages predicted for 2008, this is an important revenue generator for mobile operators. IM is on the other end of the same scale – people are used to having free IM solutions on their desktops. Moving to the mobile domain, the expectations will be the same, and operators will have a hard time trying to get money for the service, especially when mobile IM clients from Yahoo!, Microsoft and others are already available for free.
This means that with a modest data plan from the operators, users will be able to get a free IM service and decide to ditch SMS. Such an approach will reduce the revenue of the operators and will place them more as pipe sellers than service providers. This means that operators have no incentive of providing IM services or promoting them – they will make them as hard as they can to deploy. Handsets today don’t come with an IM client preinstalled because of this reason – as most handsets are sold today through operators, operators simply don’t want such an application to be part of your phone.
People can still decide to download, install and use an IM client on their smart phones today, but they need to decide to do so. Getting to a critical mass for this service will take more than a year. SMS on the other hand is operational on all handsets worldwide – no installation needed.
SMS benefits
SMS has additional advantages over IM as well.
- It works to every mobile phone number. No need to befriend the “person” you are contacting
- It is used for micro payments – especially for donation purposes
- It is used for TV voting
These services are not natural to IM. SMS is definitely here to stay.
What might change this schedule and bring it sooner to handsets? The iPhone of course. It is changing the way we use phones and the way handset vendors are developing them.
Comments and trackbacks
1. mrinal | June 28th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Hoiw would the operator charge a service like IM. Will it be charged based on the time for which the session is established or the amount of data.
2. Tsahi Levent-Levi | June 28th, 2008 at 10:26 am
mrinal,
I believe that IM will work only if flat rate is used. You pay once for all of your data needs and IM will be part of it – that’s the reason it will take time to happen – operators need to grow into this idea first.
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