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I want my wireless e-mail!
Wireless mystery: Why the most pressing and explicit demand in the mobile telecom market remains unsatisfied.
by Bruno Giussani
First published in Total Telecom
6 June 2003
The wireless industry is in denial. It keeps pushing an ever-expanding range of services and devices, and trying to convince customers that their happiness and their success depend on them. Yet, it is practically ignoring the only thing that most people really care about and can no longer do without and find increasingly difficult to manage (and therefore they may welcome a little help).
That thing is e-mail.
It doesn't take great leaps of imagination to see that the most pressing and explicit demand in the whole mobile telecom market today is for an easy, immediate, effective and standardized way to read and answer e-mail from wherever through a wireless handset. Unmistakable signs are all around us. What keeps growing and growing on the Internet? E-mail. What frustrates everyone you meet at a business conference? They can't find a proper connection to answer their e-mail. What makes people nervous when a meeting goes overtime? They want to go back to their desk and check e-mail. What's the question you ask yourself before leaving for a week of vacation? "Should I bring my laptop along so I can check e-mail?" What is that you dread most when you come back if you didn't bring the laptop? The mountain of e-mails waiting in the inbox.
It's so evident that it's almost embarrassing to have to point it out: the key online service is e-mail, and all the rest is just an optional. Taking it wireless in an easy-to-use and consistent way stands for real customer value, and therefore for a huge potential market. Yet it is also the most underserved: no one is providing it.
I can hear the answers: you can read your e-mail with most of the mobile phones on sale today. True. You can use WAP, or MMS, or even get your e-mail forwarded to your phone as an SMS or read to you by an artificial voice. You can buy a dedicated device, such as the Blackberry. Certain phones and wireless-enabled PDAs can synchronize with Outlook and you can scribble your message on the screen. But: who's doing it? Almost nobody: even the iconic Blackberry, three years after its release, has less than half a million users, ie. 0.03 percent of the overall wireless subscribers base. And the few who do use these solutions, complain. Because they all complicated, too expensive, unpractical, and ultimately unusable.
They are difficult to set up. They're incompatible with each other. The software is not standardized and the hardware sub-optimal. They make it impossible to quickly write a decently-spelled and properly-worded answer longer than five words. Their ergonomic is bulky and impractical. They don't offer a good overview of the message and of the mailboxes. They're slow. They're expensive. They don't provide enough security. In a business context they need a lot of integration and management efforts. This list of shortcomings can go on endlessly. The multiple announcements at the recent 3GSM World Congress in Cannes and at Cebit in Hannover have done nothing to shorten it.
Of course providing a good, easy, standard wireless e-mail solution is a complex task. It means getting an awful lot of things right, involving the device's hardware, its software, the network, the systems, and the overall usability. So what? Isn't this the same industry that has been promising do-it-all devices that would give easy access to a wealth of life-changing mobile services: enabling payments, acting as personal IDs, replacing keys and game consoles, providing guidance in a foreign city, monitoring your home, automatically rearranging your travel schedule if your flight gets delayed, while also allowing for the old-fashioned phone calls of course?
Compared to all this, easy wireless e-mail for corporations and for individual users shouldn't be such an enormous challenge. But to provide it the whole industry has to get together and work as one, making sure that whatever it creates, it is an agreed-upon and open standard. Yet in the plethora of forums and other congregations that inflate the bureaucracy of the mobile telecommunication industry, where is the Wireless E-mail Forum? Instead, fragmentation seems to be fashionable: each operator and each manufacturer is pushing its own solution and making sure that it won't work with that of the competition. "We don't have time for standards, we have to sell products" is the refrain one can hear at industry gatherings. In so doing, they contribute to keep the huge demand for easy wireless e-mail unsatisfied.
(copyright Bruno Giussani)
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