Mobile winners will learn from history

Short Message Service (SMS) has taken the UK market by storm. Between us we generate more than one billion text messages each month in the UK alone.

But SMS is just the tip of what is becoming a phenomenal iceberg. In years to come mobile devices will take the place not only of phones but of organisers and wallets and will even function as a unique set of keys.

But to capitalise on this little-known market, the industry needs to take note of the lessons learned from the voice industry.

While the voice services market grew dramatically from 1988 to 1993, mobile service operators are not going to have that time luxury.

This is already an explosive market; there will be little room for experimenting or getting it wrong, and inexperience will not be tolerated.

The winners in the voice services arena not only had the facility to deliver but the creativity to develop a whole range of services that users hadn't dreamed of needing.

It is this combination of winning technology and imaginative flair that will again set apart the mobile services winners.

Losers in the voice services market included the telcos which became commodity players with nothing to set themselves apart from each other. If you are in only the telecoms game then you will get squeezed very hard.

The winning strength in SMS will be in diversification, the anticipation of customers' needs and marketplace movement. It is this strength that is also key to becoming a successful early player in the emerging mobile arena, where content is king.

The voice industry invested heavily in growing customer bases, rather than in building customer loyalty. It became a case of quantity rather than quality.

Mobile service operators can use this lesson and adopt a strategy of creating value to grow a customer base, which will pay for the continual service development that will be required to retain that loyalty.

It is about having real customers whose needs, likes and dislikes you truly understand, rather than just a lot of numbers.

Mobile access to data services will revolutionise the way we work, think and play. And while there will be a lot of failures along the way, the winners will be the companies that take on board the lessons from the voice services industry and don't make the same mistakes.

Gary Corbett is managing director of Opera Telecom.

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