On Tue, 8 Dec 2009, Alex Balashov 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. 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").
And is limited to iPhone apps. Sure, AIM could support it, and in theory any smartphone can support AIM if a client is written for it, and THAT smartphone supports either background apps or push notification. But that's a few million phones. Not 4.6 billion. No other active and installed messaging platform is in the hands, pockets or purses of more people than SMS. Nothing. Until some app, service or messaging method hits 20% deployment on the world's 4.6 billion active subscribed phones, it doesn't matter what phones CAN do or how much better they can do it.
Look at Beta vs VHS -- better did not win.
And BlueRay did not displace DVD.
You can't compare 480p to 1080p. Beta vs VHS was 480i to 480i.
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.
Email is great for longer than 160. It already works on most phones, even non-smartphones. I have one of my Gmail accounts running on my Sprint Katana DLX, and I get almost instant notification when I get a new email. But I had to pay for a data plan to do that, and people who know my phone number but not what email address is attached to my phone can't send me messages. You don't have to tell people anything other than your phone number (not your carrier, not your country, not your mothers maiden name) to enable them sending you a message. THAT is why SMS rules, and will continue to rule, for some time. I predict that SMS will continue to dominate well past 2015. And even if it doesn't, I'm going to make some money off of SMS now and for the next 1-3 years as you predict -- not gonna sit on my hands waiting for the market to show me the light.
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.
Will SMS be replaced by something? Was the horse replaced by the Model-T in 1905? Of course! But who cares now? It hasn't been replaced, there isn't anything that is even close to competing with SMS, and from a business standpoint, there is money to be made with SMS NOW. When that something else comes along, we'll change. Are you gonna stop investing in VoIP because it might be replaced by something else in 1-3 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.
I think the problem is that you haven't done any research into what it costs to get a single DID with SMS enabled, nor the cost per message. There are no onerous terms, tight control, or hefty minima if you find a tier 2 or 3 reseller who has gone through that pain themselves and will resell to you at a price you can resell to your customers. I think your argument is based on a single email in this thread that mentioned a $5,000 minimum with Syneverse or something. There are other, less expensive and no-minimum ways to do SMS for VoIP, and that is why we disagree. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Beckman Internet Guy beckman at angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------