5/15/2007

SMS - Dead or Alive?

My friend Roland Tanglao had this to say -

SMS is dead - Twitter proves it
SMS sucks and twitter proves it. When a well funded startup like Twitter which is full of smart people can’t get SMS to scale, then something is wrong. And the something that is wrong is wait for it …. the carriers. The carriers control SMS which is why it sucks. If SMS were NEA it wouldn’t suck but it is not so good-bye and good riddance.

SMS is dead. Maybe not today maybe not tomorrow but soon as we have flat rate affordable mobile internet. The replacement will be something over good ‘ole IP. Probably Jabber.

Roland and I agree on a lot of things, but not this one. I’m inclined to agree that Jabber or something like it over IP will take center stage for high-end power users to interact with solutions like Twitter or Jaiku, and with web/community sites like FaceBook and MySpace. No disputing that.

SMS sits in a different technology space and it’s far from dead. Just because Nokia makes fancy high-end N-series and E-series phones, And Motorla, Win5 Mobile supporters and the rest all shove those fancy handhelds in everyone’s face simply doesn’t mean that SMS is dead, not scalable or even in jeopardy.

There are dozens of other bona fide uses for SMS and hundreds of thousands of users worldwide who have neither the means nor motivation to change. Even with the SMS problems I’m having with Twitter, those aren’t SMS problems. They’re Twitter architectural and design problems at the core. I still send plenty of SMS communications every day whether Twitter functions or not.

I see SMS as alive and well, but limited to what it is.

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* Filed by Ken at 7:44 pm under Mobility & Handheld, Portable Pleasures - PDA/Smartphones, Tech in General, Technology, Unified Communications

5 Responses to “SMS - Dead or Alive?”

  1. Roland Tanglao
    May 16th, 2007 | 12:40 am

    Tell you what, if I am wrong (definition of wrong to be decided by us over a nice bottle of wine or some fine German or Belgium beer :-) !) on May 15, 2012, I’ll grill you a steak dinner :-) ! Deal?

  2. Moshe Maeir
    May 16th, 2007 | 1:16 am

    Ken,
    You are right, probably for the next 10 years…
    What people forget is that there are approx. 2 billion simple cell phones out there.
    If you remember at ETEL we saw a presentation by Microsoft India where they built an application for truck drivers which communicated over SMS. If such a thing was done in the states they probably would have used fancy handhelds with GPRS. But in India (only a billion + people) the driver makes $150 a month and they need a simple phone with simple applications. SMS fits the bill.

  3. Is SMS dead because of Twitter? at Roam4free
    May 16th, 2007 | 1:31 am

    [...] Ken disagrees and I am totally on his side. Twitter is now really beginning to creak with late delivery of messages and sometimes no delivery at all. I feel for Twitter having gone through a couple of days of sleepless night on Yak but this is definitely a Twitter issue not an SMS issue. I personally am aware of five companies examining the SMS space in depth and I feel the service has really only been scratched, unfortunately SMS is such a one dimension product it is difficult to expand upon. [...]

  4. Ken
    May 16th, 2007 | 4:46 pm

    Roland - I think we should do the beer, wine and steaks and skip talking about SMS. We can find way more interesting things to talk about over dinner and drinks!

    Moshe - That was my point. SMS is widely used and will be for a long time. But I also know Roland was saying that a bit tongue-in-cheek. To support his view, SMS may be dead in North America where carriers don’t know how to package and sell it or service and deliver it. Here SMS is a marginal service for many people. In the rest of the world, it’s terribly important stuff.

  5. Roland Tanglao
    May 20th, 2007 | 1:54 pm

    ok ken, we’ll do the beer and steaks soon and talk about more interesting stuff in 2007 and in 2012 we’ll do another one :-) !

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