"Just Dial, Point, Shoot, Oh Drat, I've Got a Message"
There is this truly hilarious article on the BBC about sending pics and flics on those fancy cellphones. Any product manager should take notes...
Some precious outtakes:
"More than 167 million handsets were sold globally between July and September 2004, a period that, according to Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi is "seldom strong". ..In fact, the numbers of people not taking and sending pictures, audio and video is growing."
- The more they sell, the fewer are used. Since cellphone services underwrite the gadget, looks like they're losing money, but making it up in volume.
It gets better. "Research bears out the suspicion that people are not sending multimedia messages because they do not know how to. "
- Oh, they've reached the pinnacle - they are perfectly stupid in buying something they don't understand.
"According to Continental Research, 29% of the people it questioned said they were technophobes that tended to shy away from innovation. Only 11% regarded themselves as technically savvy enough to send a picture or video message. "
- And they know it!
"The fact that multimedia services are not interoperable across networks and phones only adds to people's reluctance to start sending them"
- But of course, we do have some technical issues. That's why when one exec at Oracle asked for a video he'd already produced to be run in 3GPP (which we did already as part of the ExecProducer process - that's what parallel scalability is all about), I emailed him the 3GPP vids. You see, I had already heard he hadn't subscribed to any services, so I told him to upload it to the device via his computer. So much for services...
Finally, the icing on the cake. "But when networks do find a good way to get multimedia to their customers, the results can be dramatic... As a result 40% of the subscribers to the Hutch Alive, which uses Celltick's broadcast technology, regularly click for more pictures, sounds and images from the operator. . '
- %40 isn't bad from zero, so maybe folks do want to use these things. They just want them presented in a sensible way.