Why MMS is struggling worldwide
When I asked our erstwhile correspondent and 3G Guru Mike Gauba why MMS was struggling worldwide I expected a somewhat complex answer. However Mike surprised me with his simplicity.
Mike told me, that after exploring into it, he came up with the following succinct cause and affect, starting with his fundamental proposition that MMS is a means to deliver multimedia messages and thus its success is closely coupled with the value proposition of the technology-enabled application that will drive its usage.
Gauba: My research showed that MMS has very high synergy with "Impromptu Photography", for it offers an opportunity to instantaneously share images and videos with the distant located people and also allows to download them onto web sites and blogs.
This encouraged me to conduct a joint success analysis of MMS and Impromptu Photography and found the following deterrents to their success:
- Impromptu Photography is a secondary application on a camera phone - the primary being the voice. Since I firmly believe that secondary applications are always likely to struggle throughout their lifecycles this gave me insight into why MMS is struggling.
- Camera phones normally have small displays, which limits their visibility – and hence actually limits the synergy between imaging and MMS. This is likely to force people to have a very casual attitude towards the application.
As a general observation Gauba also noted that the mass market that provides the critical mass is made up of technology conservatives, who require specialized technology management strategies to excite them to use technology-enabled applications.
Yet operators today are using the mass consumer commodity strategies that they used for mobile voice. These strategies have only been able to achieve a low level of MMS usage after which it flattens out, he added.
(Gauba offered to help operators to exploit the full potential of the synergy between the MMS and Impromptu Photography - contact above.)
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