Telcos should focus on being dump pipes and leave the application layer to others.
Going into messages or even content is nothing but a rent seeking attempt to exploit a missing net neutrality mandate.
Going into messages or even content is nothing but a rent seeking attempt to exploit a missing net neutrality mandate.
Wow, where are you living? I haven't paid to send an MMS in nearly ten years...
There's a reason WhatsApp is basically the only messaging people do here - carrier based messaging is an exploitative money trap.
I actually just checked what I currently pay for an MMS and youfone.nl doesn't even mention it in the price list. Since I have to ask, I guess I can't afford it :-)
More to the point, if you’re a publicly traded company with stock price and future earnings based off on this kind of rent seeking being priced into your valuation, and let’s also say you desperately wanted to do some the honorable thing and ramp operations down to dumb pipe level, how could the markets and shareholders ever let you do that?
The Ma Bells of this world are in over their heads and it’s hard to see things change without state intervention (a politically sensitive topic over in the UK, but that could get pretty off topic.)
In longevity. We will always need dumb pipe companies. If you can keep a decent reputation then perhaps it'll be easier to continue offering that service. You're less likely to get regulated and people will still use your services if a competitor appears. Steam is a good example on that front. If a company wants to make the maximum amount of profit then longevity is a must.
If society wants dumb pipe providers, we’ll have to radically alter the business ecology of the telecoms sector.
Oh, to have a modestly profitable and much less ambitious dumb-pipe provider eat all their lunches!
If you want to know why Android still doesn’t have a standard messaging app or a standard video chat app, blame the incompetence of Google who has a half dozen failed messaging initiatives under its belt. Once it was dominant on Android, google could also release an app for iOS.
It did Hangouts messages, video / data voice calls, or traditional voice calls or SMS messages depending on the capabilities of the other client.
But the culture of new products launched rather than iterating on existing products like Gchat and allo and other products needing to be launched and hangouts being pillaged on its feature set so the other ones would look like they had a reason to exist meant that instead of working towards a Google version of iMessage that they could release an iOS client for and that's dominate all messaging, Google fragmented their efforts in a spectacular manner.
Companies, in particular companies that run infrastructure through public spaces, don’t exist in a vacuum.