Self-Inflicted

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

During a meeting with the Mobile Data Services division of the largest cellular carrier in the nation, I realized how arrogant they were just because of their sheer size. They think because of their 7 million subscribers and their vast network infrastructure they can control every aspect of the partnership with their content suppliers without even giving their partners a choice. Building cellular data services is a killing-a-chicken-with-a-machine-gun problem; you spray bullets all over the barn and then go in and check how many chickens you've actually killed (you get to keep them for dinner). As for the bullets that don't hit, you don't have to worry about them, they're expendable. You can just drop your unpopular services any time you want to. Carriers should make it a breeze for content providers to connect to their systems and allow them to do it in the shortest time possible. Furthermore, carriers should share with their content partners a significant amount of the revenues generated from these services. It's called incentive. It's something every mobile operator here ought to understand. 7 million customers or not.
9:04:50 AM comment []