review : after smart
The real reason wired phones are declining..
People usually say the decline of wired phones came from the arrival of mobile/smartphones. But the drop in wired usage did not begin in 1999 when mobile grew explosively — it began 9 years later, in 2009. What really deserves attention is that in a 2008 survey of buyers, 43% said they bought a mobile device for texting, not for calling. This tells us that the shift is not "wired → wireless → text" as a matter of a device's specific function, but the very type of communication changing, from "voice → text."
Why do smartphones sell so well?
1) The internet? PDAs could also do the internet fine.
2) Applications? Most people don't even properly use 20% of the smart features on a smartphone.
3) The real reason people buy a smartphone: what's interesting is that customers buy smartphones because of KakaoTalk. Carriers are protesting and even imposing restrictions on KakaoTalk because it enables free texts/calls. But customers do not use KakaoTalk because it's free, nor do they buy a smartphone because it runs KakaoTalk. They simply say they just don't want to be the one excluded from the conversation among friends.
— Free messaging was fine with NateOn too; it's free and lets you add friends.
— Existing SMS is also based on the contacts in your phone. If anything, KakaoTalk is the one based on the phone's number list. (Of course, things have changed and grown more complicated since, but the starting point I mean here is the initial, primal moment when value was being created.)
Let me posit this. If Steve Jobs had made the iPhone from the start and shown it to people; if instead of the iPhone, the Android phone had come first — would the smartphone be used the way it is now? Or... would it have formed a market like the PDA market of old?
Thinking about direction, or perspective.
At a glance, it may look like wordplay, but the above carries a very important difference in perspective. A tiny difference at the start produces an enormous difference in the outcome.
For instance, look at how domestic carriers keep benchmarking today's App Store. Even government agencies are stepping in to train developers, and of course they subsidize startups. Register on the app store and sometimes they hand out cash, first-come-first-served, no questions asked. Meanwhile, customers haven't even decided whether they'll come to Android or Windows Mobile, but first, the climate and conditions for suppliers and supply volume are being expanded. Schools lead the charge like that, and the government supports them that way. For manufacturers (the big companies) of Android or Windows Mobile devices, it's all upside.
But what matters is:
1. Beyond the supply-and-demand laws, mass-training of individual entrepreneurs creates a huge! problem. Overproduced goods can be dumped or cleared, but individual entrepreneurs are not goods. Their failures and dropouts break another balance. Those developers (founders) are consumers too.
2. As mentioned earlier, what matters is that those measures or directions are not fundamental solutions. Just as the decline in wired-phone usage was not from the smartphone but from a change in how people communicate, I am saying that the iPhone App Store's growth is not fundamentally a matter of their policies, or price, or the number of apps, or the easy dev environment for third parties.
3. Lazy, stopgap responses or dismissive stances from big companies will ultimately drive those same big companies into financial trouble. As above, the developers left behind are consumers too.
"So what is it you want to say?" — Don't benchmark the App Store.
