There is a fight going on that you may not be aware of. The fight of the messenger!
Short Messaging Service (SMS) or text messaging was first introduced to the mass market in the 90’s. Although this was a ‘nice little feature’, mobile operators generally saw little point in text messaging and didn’t see why consumers would use it when they could call instead. But boy were they wrong!
Now over 20 years later it is estimated that we send 23 billion messages per day globally!
With figures like that you can see why everyone from Vodafone to Facebook is trying to capture every bit of the market.
But what’s the attraction with a simple technology that is 20 years old?
Historically SMS were commercially attractive because consumers used to pay for text messages but now days that is rarely the case as other free of charge platforms have been introduced and SMS are often bundled in with a contract. Most messaging companies simply want to grab market share and although they will get some revenue from it, they are actually looking at other ways to make it commercially viable.
So the race is on to become the global messenger leader and either selling lots of ‘Big Data’ or selling advertising space or both seems to be the accepted way to make the service commercial viable at the moment.
As there is currently no globally accepted authority on the matter, consumers probably use ten different messaging platforms which creates silos of users for example; WhatsApp messaging can’t speak to Skype for Business nor iMessenger to Twitter. This means that the consumer has multiple accounts and credits for each application, none of which can ‘talk’ to each other and each needs managing.
What’s needed is an open source application that works to converge different platforms into one seamless experience. Unfortunately, this appears to be a while off, with so many global businesses fighting for dominance a utopia for messaging is still yet to be seen.