Will IM kill MMS
(Originally Published on infoSync) Woohooo… buzz word attack! In the red corner, Instant Messaging (IM) with the likes of ICQ, AIM and MSN Messenger; all having turned into amazing success stories on the Desktop. Mirabilis, the Israeli company that brought us the first of them all, ICQ, ended up being bought by AOL in 1998, only 12 months after founding, for over 280 million USD — in cash, not counting the additional performance incentives!
In the black corner, Multimedia messaging (MMS), the next wave in data communications over wireless networks, replacing SMS as the next messaging standard (you can read more about MMS here). The Register recently revealed that Nokia charges $6.3 million USD for an MMS server capable of handling 10,000 users. The messaging is where the money is. Welcome to the next big wireless fight.
MMS, recently introduced by Vodafone in Germany, is supposed to bring us even more, and of course better, ways of communicating with all kinds of people, which is one of the reasons why the biggest players in the wireless arena have joined forces to make MMS a reality. They want to be absolutely certain that there is one common standard in all MMS-capable devices of the future — similar to how SMS works now — in order for messaging to work seamlessly wherever you are and with whomever you’d like to exchange messages with.
IM, on the contrary, is already available on Desktops worldwide and helps both individuals and companies to streamline their communications, as well as reach out and get in touch with just about anyone. But don’t expect the mobile phone companies to ignore the IM space.
In fact, Nokia, Ericsson and a number of other manufacturers are participating in the Wireless Village initiative, which has as its goal to create a global standard for Instant Messaging on mobile devices. Companies in the mobile space are doing their best to avoid repeating the same compatibility mess as on the Desktop, where services such ICQ, MSM and AIM can’t talk to one another — while applications that aim to provide cross-platform IM compatibility such as Odigo, Trillian and others frequently have problems connecting to at least one of the several services. Full interoperability is something mobile phone manufacturers and carriers believe to be crucial for the success of IM on mobile devices. It will not be an option in the long run to have 3 or more different IM applications running on your phone at the same time just so you can stay in contact with your friends and colleagues.
This is where Microsoft comes in with the Smartphone and Pocket PC 2002 platforms. All devices running on those platforms include MSN Messenger, one of the most widely used IM clients out there. In a recent article by C|Net, it became clear that while Microsoft might be supporting MMS in the future, the copmany has not made up its mind just yet and is currently looking into all options. If MMS will become the huge success many predict, then why doesn’t Microsoft have a firm commitment to the emerging standard? Because Microsoft is looking at putting in place a translator that will allow users to send and receive MMS messages from within MSN Messenger.
To understand the big picture it’s necessary to take a step back, and while we’re at it, try shutting out all of the hype and focus only at what both technologies can currently do, or promise to do. In doing so, you will see that current IM clients can largely do what MMS is said to be able to do. You can send pictures, audio, documents — anything, really. If Microsoft really adds features to MSN Messenger that will let users send and receive MMS messages and makes sure such capabilities are delivered with every Pocket PC and Smartphone device shipped, that would not only give those devices MMS capabilities but a full IM client on top of that. These features, coupled with full Exchange Server support, could be a major selling point at a sales pitch to corporations.
But who is MMS really designed for? Mainly the same people who are active users of SMS now, meaning the youth market and then some. The entertainment or fun aspect of SMS, which makes the youth out there use it, was a major driver for adoption and only now are businesses starting to see the interesting opportunities that SMS might bring them. Still, though, SMS is mostly an easy to use method of sending short, uninterruptive and discrete text messages to friends or colleagues. On top of that, in Europe you can send an SMS to absolutely anyone, and you don’t need to try to remember whether your friend or colleague has a supported phone — which is a direct result of the cooperation between mobile phone manufacturers and carriers. MMS will work the same way, if everything goes according to plan. If the receiving phone doesn’t support the MMS standard, then the user of that phone will be told where to get the MMS at a later date, over WAP or from a PC with an Internet connection, and a lot of effort will also be placed into making the MMS system within your phone as user friendly as possible.
Microsoft’s battle plan seems to have one ultimate goal; to keep the standard in their hands, which the company has a knack for doing — and seen from a purely business perspective, it’s not a bad idea. The only problem is that the mobile world has learnt that non-compatible standards are bad for their business. Just look at ring tone and logo messaging, which already works seamlessly between Nokia phones. There are numerous websites nowadays where Nokia phone users can download logos and ring tones to make their phones more personal. Other companies saw the opportunity but didn’t want to license Nokia’s system which would effectively hand over control of SMS messaging to Nokia. This has lead other manufacturers to introduce EMS (Enhanced Messaging System), which brings the same enhancements, but is incompatible with Nokia’s proprietary SMS-based system. With EMS, you can also download ring tones and logos for other phones from web sites. If a user wants to send a ring tone to a friend though, both the sending and receiving phone will either have to be Nokia phones or EMS capable phones. A message with a ring tone or logo sent between a Nokia and a Siemens phone, will come out garbled on one end. For users, this means they won’t be able to blindly send a message with a logo or a small ring tone to friends. They know that some will not be able to receive it. SMS works between all phones. Sending ring tones doesn’t. SMS is a huge success. Sending ring tones from phones to phones is not taking off because it just doesn’t work at all times, and in that sense, while keeping a standard under your control could prove to be a good business idea, the wireless arena might not be the place to do it.
With MMS, manufacturers don’t want the ring tone and logo incompatibility mess to take place all over again, but rather to make sure MMS will work everywhere. This is easily taken care of though, since MMS relies on a special server which is able to find out if the phone can do MMS or not and react accordingly. E-Plus in Germany, for example, just recently introduced i-mode and will be using such a server to bring MMS to the mobile phones of their i-mode users even though i-mode phones don’t have native support for MMS. They just use the i-mode/SMS system to alert a user of an MMS message which can then be picked up. One a side note, it’ll be interesting to see whether — and, if so, how — they add a method for sending MMS messages to their i-mode service.
What Microsoft seems to be planning could be very similar to what E-Plus does. Most, if not all devices using Microsoft’s current mobile platforms, will be powerful enough to connect to the web via WAP and even access a standard HTML page. That means they can receive an SMS with a URL to the MMS message. In reality, receiving MMS messages isn’t a difficult feat as long as the device is powerful enough in the sense of containing a color display, good sound capabilities and an efficient network connection. Sending MMS messages easily will require a good interface which will most likely be easier to put directly on the phone than on some web/WAP page.
What Microsoft is without doubt going to make sure of, though, is that Instant Messaging is present on all its platforms — most likely because this could be important for getting into the corporate market, which is the company’s primary focus. Remember; Microsoft has approached the mobile platforms market coming from an Operating System and Office business angle, where customers usually buy a few thousand licenses at a time. The mobile phone business doesn’t really work like that, but is rather made up by manufacturers who build their own operating systems and sell directly to individual users one at a time — a lot of the time. Most people consider their mobile phone a personal gadget and do not have the same relation to it as to their corporate Desktop PC, and this is the way manufacturers such as Nokia attack the market.
Nokia wants to appeal to a lot of different users, all with different tastes and experience. There needs to be one system that is easily understandable and easy to use by everybody and easy to use on any phone, which means e-mail and IM in their present forms and implementations on mobile devices can quickly be discarded. On a small screen, without the capability of a full presence listing of your buddies and no option for overlapping windows, due to OS capabilities or size, IM would be overkill. On top of that, manufacturers want complete interoperability, something IM in its current state cannot provide unless a translation solution is put in place — which would be a far cry from a good solution.
As you’ll have noticed by now, there’s a distinct difference in the way manufacturers and Microsoft attack the mobile devices market. Nokia and other manufacturers want the entire market with an easy to use and amazingly scalable solution, while MS wants the corporate market with their own solutions no matter what. Simply put, Microsoft is going at it from an angle that hasn’t been attempted before, and there’s no clear winner as of yet.
I’m not sure whether Microsoft’s marketing people can win this war since they don’t seem to have another choice than play with the cards that have been dealt them from the top brass — unless the company suddenly changes its attitude and becomes an open player. The business guy that is on a business trip wants to be connected to the office but if there is an option to send a rich multimedia message to his wife from the future holiday spot he just found, then he will not be using MSN Messenger but MMS, if he can. It needs to be simple. Phone companies know that. Microsoft won’t be able to integrate such a solution into the company’s overall battle plan easily.