Woohoo! I might have started the longest thread in the history of voiceops :) I don't know from nothing about business. All I'm really sure of is that I've got several furlongs of managers that simply won't go away until I get some kind of SMS solution wired up. Thanks for the input, everyone, David PS: Next I think I'll ask something like "If IPv4 is so broken, why throw good money after bad and invest in IPv6?" http://www.forumspile.com/Flame-Flame_on.jpg :) On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 8:37 PM, Alex Balashov <abalashov at evaristesys.com> wrote:
Peter Beckman wrote:
?Hell, I'm not even sure what _I_ am doing next year, much less the rest of ?the world when it comes to text messaging communications. ?I do know that ?SMS is growing now, is in active use now, and for me to put some effort ?into building a messaging infrastructure surrounding my VoIP service makes ?sense. ?If I do it intelligently, then the messaging infrastructure I ?build now can support SMS now and whatever comes next later.
Agreed. ?At the end of the day, prognostication of such organic market trends is informed voodoo at very best. ?This will, as it has, remain a matter of opinion at the end of the day.
?Most of the smartphones can't run a messaging app in the background, and ?if it can, which one should it?
That is not entirely true. ?Many smartphones can run a messaging app in the background; ?for those that can't, there are ways around it.
For example, Apple is notorious for prohibiting the concept on the iPhone. ?However, it does provide a "push notification" API which can be used by an application that has servers on the back end holding connections to messaging services open surrogately. ?In my case, I use the Beejive IM client to stay connected to our company's internal Jabber/XMPP server; ?when one of our associates sends me a message to the appropriate account, I receive an incoming message on my phone that is identical to an incoming SMS in appearance and disposition. However, when I press "View" it will open Beejive instead of the SMS application and initiate a conversation. ?Thus, my experience of receiving an IM this way is not different than my experience of receiving an SMS, although I agree that other limitations are presently in force (who can send me an IM that way, how easily, what type of phone it takes to make that happen, etc.)
It's a nasty hack, to be sure, and I predict this aversion to TSRs will gradually go away, or be replaced by a more elegant compromise to support asynchronously generated incoming events without client-side polling (aka "push").
The only thing all handsets and all ?carriers support for public messaging is SMS. ?Until the phone can ?natively and in a built-in way support other messaging platforms that are ?supported by all handsets and carriers, SMS is here for a while. ?Just ?because it sucks and there are better things out there doesn't mean it's ?going away. ?Look at Beta vs VHS -- better did not win.
And BlueRay did not displace DVD. ?I agree that better is not always a winner, especially if it's more expensive. ?My position is a bet on whether mobile handsets will continue to be used principally as phones and textual data terminals in the next 1-3 years. ?I predict that they will not, and if they will, certainly the user expectations will grow to a superset of what SMS currently provides. ?The price and maximum length of messages is the most crippling, not the format.
?I believe it is impossible for anyone to know what will replace SMS, or ?even if SMS will be replaced entirely in the next 2-20 years. ?If you do, ?don't tell us! ?Build it yourself, and wait for the money to roll in, ?because you'll be the only provider offering it.
It is not necessary to know what will replace it with great confidence in order to be quite certain that it will be replaced by something.
?In the meantime, building SMS capabilities into VoIP DIDs is a service ?that can be sold now, and my gut says for a good long while (5+ years).
I suppose it really depends on the market and the context. ?My argument is not that SMS is not useful or sellable now, but rather that the onerous terms, tight control and hefty minima aren't worth bothering with. ?Our premises differ in that I do not share your perception that it is practically free money simply being left on the table; ?it is not effortless or wholly cheap to develop, productise and bill SMS services.
-- Alex Balashov - Principal Evariste Systems Web ? ? : http://www.evaristesys.com/ Tel ? ? : (+1) (678) 954-0670 Direct ?: (+1) (678) 954-0671 _______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops