One of the principles we're promoting over at the Telco 2.0 blog is that you need to optimise your existing business as well as make changes to move forward. Those optimisations are what gives you the slack to fund the change without your shareholders suffering cardiac arrest at seeing your future plans. We give some examples down at the bottom of this post on improving voice and messaging revenues.
I came across another couple of examples this week. The wife and kids are abroad, and only accessible via mobile phone as they're staying in the summer house. So as I was crossing Hungerford bridge in central London I thought I'd take a self portrait with London's sights in the background and send my best wishes. This was to be my first ever MMS message. (Obviously, it's a really compelling service... not.)
Drat and buggerations. My new phone isn't set up for MMS. There's no auto-discovery via DHCP for the settings, no universal standard that the default MMS gateway is configured in DNS to be called "MMS". So I'm stuck.
It should be a shame and embarassment to the industry that people face this situation, particularly given the trend towards buying unlocked handsets that aren't factory-configured for your network. How bad it is really? Well, if I have one attempt at sending an MMS, and it fails, the real revenue loss is the 50 more I didn't send before I get my next handset, plus the, um, couple of thousand other people I also denigrate MMS to and don't bother even trying.
But it gets worse. Now I'm home and have uploaded the picture to my PC, I still can't send it! They've not done any deals with Skype et al to revenue share MMS money and make it worth their while to integrate and promote this capability. So I'm sending SMS messages at 4p a pop via Skype, but the revenue opportunity was far greater. Their loss. Mine too.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 2:20 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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