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3G Is A Dog, And Other Truths
naylorjs writes: "This is an interesting article from the BBC about the technological future, in particular broadband and wireless. What makes it more interesting is the comments about nation states and such like. A certain amount of lateral thinking in use here, something that we don't see enough of in the technology field. IMHO."
I mean, really. Negroponte's always been so long on handwaving and short on actual technical pragmatism. And it's not like people have actually listened to a word the man said since "Being Digital".
Why is broadband good? "Different rhythm, different response time, different way of dealing with the web itself." Yeah, I bet that was your reasoning for getting DSL, too (if you happened to be stoned at the time). Except apparently you wouldn't want DSL because the order-of-magnitude speed increase over a modem "isn't giving the consumer enough difference". Apparently being able to stream live video to a handset isn't worth anything.
Well, thanks a lot, Nicholas. You can go back in your box for another five years.
-- Yoz
Funny...for someone who works at one of the most technically-apt universities in North America, I didn't expect to hear this from him: Again, they have lost a lot of money on 3G for reasons that had nothing to do with the marketing side of 3G. It had to do with the terrible mistake made here in the UK over the auction process that was copying a bad American idea and repeating it here. It's a dog and people shouldn't want it and in fact I don't think it will see the light of day.
3G isn't bad. The American handling of 3G is, but you shouldn't punish consumers because of the fact you believe the standard is crap. If everyone cared about what America wanted in its consumer electronics standards, then America wouldn't be the sole dissenting voice in cellular standards. The problem isn't one of technology here, but one of corporate moneylust getting in the way of good ol' common sense.
Look at how consumer electronics devices have blossomed in the Orient...They've made 3G devices a part of their lives. The reason it won't work here is because our society as a whole looks down on a lot of the new technology as being fad-ish. Until marketers get a clue and discover just how to pitch these devices and demonstrate how they can complete our meaningless lives, they're not gonna take off.
Marketers for the last five years have been following the logic which carried them through the Internet bust, which was - "If you build it, they will come." Well, no shit, Sherlock...but you have to build something that's worth a damn to them. Quit trying to push off crap and market it as the next great thing...instead, make something that can change our lives, and prove that it will.
Many companies could afford to learn this lesson from Apple.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
One of the big problems of technology is that the world is broken into four groups who don't really understand each other.
Firstly, there are the technologists - the smart guys with their engineering PhDs from Stanford and the like who work for Ericsson, Qualcomm or Nokia. These people understand the technical reality of getting broadband services to handsets and the like.
Then there are the evangalists. These people post long, largely ill-informed, comments to slashdot. Sometimes they work for Gartner Group. If they're really lucky they get paid too much to work as VCs. These people don't really understand the technology, or consumers, but they tell a great story. Oh, and they love Amazon.com.
And then there are the business people. (And no, getting an MBA from Stanford does not automatically qualify you.) These people understand that 3G costs losts of money. They fret about what end demand will really be, and hire evangalists and technologists to try and raise some money. If they are lucky they get to sell their idea to some large company where the business development people really do have Stanford MBAs.
Finally, there is the other 99% of the population. Call them 'consumers'. They are rarely consulted about what they want; 'cause, hey, the evangalist tells a better story. Unfortunately, these are the people that actually buy and use the service. Unless consumers spend money the service will die.
So, to 3G: unless consumers see a compelling reason to massively up the amount they spend on telecommunications then 3G is in terrible trouble. ARPU for voice cell users is static or declining as penetration rises. (Why is this so? Because the handset, network infrastructure, maintenance, and license costs are much higher than 2G.)
So - where are the compelling applications that will encourage consumers to spend more?
Video phones, perhaps. Would you like a list of companies that died thinking consumers want to be seen on the phone. (Just think for a moment about the practicalities of walking down the street with your cell phone in front of you. Then think about the value of looking at someone in glorious jerky-and-small-vision with terrible lag.)
Stock quotes and charts, perhaps. Sorry, the days and number of day traders are on the wane.
OK. TV? Well perhaps, BUT think of the bandwidth requirements.
Email??? Sure, but a Blackberry or GPRS phone does it for cheaper.
Unless someone can find compelling *consumer* applications, then 3G is unlikely to be a commercial success.
*r
--- My dad's political betting
I have a cell phone. I have a desktop. I have a server, and I have a portable MP3 player. I have a truck. I have a bike, and I have a muscle car.
I say that, to say this: I did not buy an El Camino. I bought a truck, and I bought (well, restored) a muscle car.
The same goes for my desktop and server. I did not buy an over powered dual-NICed desktop to also be my server on a dsl line. I bought a desktop, and a dsl line to connect to, and a Ultra Sparc in a colocated rack at a local ISP.
In the same sort of thinking, my cell phone doesn't play MP3s, although it can surf the web, I have never even bothered to try it.
To the average consumer, a phone should be a phone, first and foremost.
Features are good if they are free, but forcing me to pay twice the price for useless stuff I would never use, just makes me spend my money at another company.
visit my free wallpaper collection, wp.erasei.com
With that as a backdrop, the truth is that what consumers want is a logarithmic scale.
I think this is the most interesting part of the article. IT is pretty much the only industry where consumers expect giant leaps in terms of performance before they upgrade. What other classical industry demands such high rates of devellopment? automotive? textile? Not really. People have come to expect more and more out of engineers over the years and the R&D to keep up with the demand has been ever increasing. Are we going to get to a point where progress is just too great and the users have no more need to upgrade, or is progress going to lag behind, thus reducing incomes and R&D --> vicious circle. I think there's a limit to how much speed is needed and that will give rise to a serious problem in a few years. What will happen when you can stream digital video uncompressed along with audio, playing games, etc on the same optic pipe? Will people go on upgrading endlessly just to show their friends "look, I can transfer my swap file from my PDA to my cell faster than you can!"...
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
Here, here!
Folk, its a telephone, for christ's sake. I wish that these marketing drones would eat a piece of the clue pie and realize that just becasue they can add a stupid feature does not mean that they must add that stupid feature. Have you ever tried "typing" using the numeric keypad of a phone? Its not worth the trouble.
Forget about wireless internet, email, MP3 playing, etc, etc. Improve the phone so that it doesn't sound like I'm talking into a tin can. Please.
Maybe, MAYBE if you could get a voice command system that would allow me to say, in plain English, commands for information to retreive (such as "How are my stocks doing today?"), that might be worth it. But you don't need a super high tech gadget to do that anyway.
First, the Japanese culture generally seems to be more in to tech gadgets than the American culture. Look at some of the thigns (Tamagochi) that have been huge successes over there while enjoying at most a modest (and usually less) success over here. Just because many Japanese consumers like multimedia phones, doesn't mean many Americans will. I certianly won't buy one so long as my StarTAC keeps working.
Second, getting 3G up and running in the US is going to cost a LOT. Remember, Japan is smaller than the state of Calafornia. There is a lot more square footage in the US that would need to have 3G equipment installed in. That higher cost of startup leads to higher inital service fees, which most people don't want to pay. This is espically true if the objective is to provide good coverage and high speed access.
Also along those lines 3G will have adoption troubles until there is a nice nationwide network. Right now my CDMA 1900 Sprint phone can get signal in most any city in all 50 states as well as most all highways. Unless the 3G rollout is on a massive scale it won't be able to compete and hence I won't be as likely to want it. A service is pretty useless if you can't get it in your area.
Finally, one of the things I and many others I know value about our particular cells is they are small. My StarTAC, folded up isn't a whole lot bigger than a pager. Well if you try to whack a 160+ pixel LCD on a phone, it's going to get a lot bigger. Not something I want to lug around.
I'm not saying 3G is necessiarly doomed to failure, but they have some issues to work out soon. The American and Japanese markets are NOT the same thing.
Again, they have lost a lot of money on 3G for reasons that had nothing to do with the marketing side of 3G.
3G licenses were sold (marketed) at the peak of the hype (marketing) about 3G being the "next big thing". Telecom companies paid billions, the market collapsed and these companies end up with big overdrafts. Bug**r all to do with the technology, quite a bit to do with marketing.
It had to do with the terrible mistake made here in the UK over the auction process that was copying a bad American idea and repeating it here.
An auction isn't a way to market something? ... the method? Auction off N licenses when you
know that there are at least N+1 (at the time, very rich) companies who need a
license to stay in business. Noone dares to drop out of the auction process,
so the prices spiral.
Granted, the UK auction process was a mistake. In particular it was designed to make money for the government (which it did very well), instead of to boost a developing technology
It's a dog and people shouldn't want it and in fact I don't think it will see the light of day.
So this is the nub of his argument? "It's a dog"? Any reason for saying this? Technical justifications? Nope. Just "It's a dog" ... profound insight!
With that as a backdrop, (Conclusive proof that it's a dog) the truth is that what consumers want is a logarithmic scale.
You can currently get 9.6k over GSM. 3G gives you (at least) 144k. So he *does* like 3G after all! Either that or he doesn't know what he's talking about.
3G doesn't even exist. Some people might argue that it'll come in a year or two years (don't think the Japanese have it, that's not 3G).
Ah! That clears up whether he knows what he's talking about or not. Who's going to tell NTT DoCoMo that there 3G system isn't Negroponte-compliant? What about the Korean mobile networks who implemented a 2.5G system and found that it actually worked well enough to be classified as 3G?
The sad part, and this isn't being discussed enough, is that it's no good.
The sad part is that attention-hungry half-informed talking heads like Negroponte continually hype up new technology to ridiculous levels, for others to talk it down the following year. It's happened with Internet services, WAP, Bluetooth and now 3G. It confuses the public and discredits the industry - but it makes good headlines.
3G is a new technology which is evolving from 2G (well, duh!). Will it be implemented? Yes. Will it be successful? That depends on whether people find enough uses for it ...
Just like when the internet started noone knew what it will really be used for. Just like the internet, the closest thing to a 'killer app' is already available (email for the net, voice calls for 3G). Unlike the internet it's been hyped to heaven and hell before it's been born.
3G does need informed discussion, it doesn't need Negroponte.
Because it's in many cases more convinient. Think about it: in the US it's common to have answering machines for sending short messages to people. Some people even get annoyed when you answer the phone, and ask you to hang up "so that they can just leave a message on the machine". You don't always want to talk to people.
Even though you can only cram 160 characters into an SMS message using 12 buttons of your tiny keyboard on a 3x10 character screen, SMS basically fulfils the role of mobile email. It may be expensive, but it's still very usable.
SMSs are also very non-intrusive. You can check your messages in the middle of a movie, or a meeting, or at midnight, and nobody would get annoyed by you talking on the phone at that time. If you suddenly remember something you needed to tell someone, you can just drop a small SMS to him. Some people send grocery shopping lists to their SOs - much better than reading one out loud, since you can always store the message and check it out when you're in a store. I personally use the text writing ability to store reminders for myself when my PDA is in my bag, or I forgot it somewhere.
In Finland, TV channels now run SMS -based chat shows when they have no scheduled programming. You can send your message to be viewed by everyone with a TV by paying only $1 USD! Sounds like a bad deal? Probably, but that does not stop people
sending hundreds of messages an hour to these moderated chat shows.
It's true what they say: in every new technology, e-mail is the killer application.
This may be hard to believe when you haven't seen it in action, but I think it's just a matter of time when the US also joins the SMS craze.