i-mode
Came across this recently:
It's funny how i-mode has been going for over five years, and no one seems to have figured out how to compete with them.
And I just have to rant:
How difficult can it be? Read "Birth of i-mode" by Mari Matsunaga about how the founding team created i-mode with a focus on user experience, as a consumer product, not a technology. The book is available in English, I bought my copy from Chuang Yi in Singapore.
It's not just about chosing the right technology ("i-mode is popular because they use cHTML rather than WAP", yeah, right!), but what kind of thinking that makes you select a certain technology, ie. you know you need to attract developers to create an ecosystem of content developers, and cHTML sounds more attractive than WAP. Not to the engineers, but to the people who want to create products, and hire engineers to make it happen. This thinking has to extend to every single part of the organisation that has anything to do with the product, because their actions and decisions will ultimately affect the product. That includes the pimply gel-haired kid in the mobile phone shop who gets a kick out of knowing more about phones than his customers, and sells what he likes. Well there are people like him at every level of the corporation.
It's ultimately a cultural thing, not a process, not a technology, not a metric, not anything that will get you status in a modern corporate environment. It doesn't matter if you spend money on some glamourous User Experience team, when you have other parts of the company run by marketing ARPU-monkeys and technology worshippers. Your User Experience people will just be a vanity department, a fashion statement. If you want status, buy a stable of Ferraris instead and spare us the trouble.
"Thirty percent (30%) of Japan’s population use mobile data and multi-media services at least 10 times a day."
It's funny how i-mode has been going for over five years, and no one seems to have figured out how to compete with them.
And I just have to rant:
How difficult can it be? Read "Birth of i-mode" by Mari Matsunaga about how the founding team created i-mode with a focus on user experience, as a consumer product, not a technology. The book is available in English, I bought my copy from Chuang Yi in Singapore.
It's not just about chosing the right technology ("i-mode is popular because they use cHTML rather than WAP", yeah, right!), but what kind of thinking that makes you select a certain technology, ie. you know you need to attract developers to create an ecosystem of content developers, and cHTML sounds more attractive than WAP. Not to the engineers, but to the people who want to create products, and hire engineers to make it happen. This thinking has to extend to every single part of the organisation that has anything to do with the product, because their actions and decisions will ultimately affect the product. That includes the pimply gel-haired kid in the mobile phone shop who gets a kick out of knowing more about phones than his customers, and sells what he likes. Well there are people like him at every level of the corporation.
It's ultimately a cultural thing, not a process, not a technology, not a metric, not anything that will get you status in a modern corporate environment. It doesn't matter if you spend money on some glamourous User Experience team, when you have other parts of the company run by marketing ARPU-monkeys and technology worshippers. Your User Experience people will just be a vanity department, a fashion statement. If you want status, buy a stable of Ferraris instead and spare us the trouble.
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