13、Mobile e-mail
Nascent
May 12th 2005 | SAN FRANCISCO From The Economist print edition
The battle for the mobile e-mail business has barely begun
SUDDENLY, it seems, everyone is realising that the next big thing in telecoms and technology could be mobile e-mail. On May 10th, Microsoft, the world’s largest software firm, unveiled a new version of its Windows operating system designed for mobile phones. This will be able to run programs from independent software firms, such as Silicon Valley’s Visto, Good Technology, SEVEN and Intellisync, that will let mobile-phone users send and receive e-mail on their handsets. This follows a very busy April, when SEVEN bought Smartner, a Finnish rival, and Visto reached deals with the largest mobile operator in the world, Vodafone, and, in Canada, with Rogers Wireless, to start rolling out mobile e-mail services.
In the short term, this would seem to be bad news, above all, for Research in Motion (RIM), a Canadian firm that now dominates mobile e-mail with its BlackBerry handheld device (nicknamed “CrackBerry” for its addictive nature). Unlike the smaller software firms snapping at its heels, RIM offers employers a complete service that includes both software and hardware. Controlling everything in this way let RIM establish an early lead.
The bigger picture is more intriguing. RIM has been stunningly successful, but even it has only around 3m users, mostly itinerant corporate executives. This compares with an estimated 150m employees worldwide who rely on e-mail but do not yet have a mobile service for it—not to mention the 1.5 billion consumers who have mobile phones, love text messaging and might also love e-mail. Of the 680m handsets sold last year, only 20m were so-called “smartphones” that double as calendar, contact book and e-mail device.
“It is still early, early, early in this—dare we say nascent?—trend,” says Pip Coburn, an analyst at UBS. He expects mobile e-mail to be a “killer application” because it taps into people’s strongest psycho-emotional needs—the urge to connect with others (and simultaneous fear of social isolation if they cannot), as well as the desire to be mobile—while asking relatively little of them by way of new learning, as they already know how to send e-mail via their PCs. Indeed, e-mail is likely to blow away a lot of the other fancy services that mobile operators are hoping to push over their third-generation wireless networks. Andrew Odlyzko, a telecoms guru, once did a survey in which he asked people to choose, hypothetically, between having either e-mail or the entire content of the world wide web: 95% chose e-mail.
This has several implications. First, as Mr Coburn argues, the trend toward “Swiss Army knife” handsets that do absolutely everything may not go very far, whereas simple and cheap “dumb smartphones” that stick to connecting people via voice, text messaging and e-mail may ultimately win in the mass market. Second, for the software industry, the field is still wide open. Woody Hobbs, the boss of Intellisync, draws an analogy to PCs in the early 1980s. Apple was then ahead with a winning product bundle of proprietary hardware and software. But eventually it lost out to a host of hardware makers whose products were compatible with Microsoft’s operating systems. Today, RIM might be cast as Apple; auditions have only just begun for all the other roles.
13、好像是在突然之间，每个人都意识到了移动电子邮件将会成为下一桩电信与科技大事。5月10日，世界最大软件商微软将一款新的基于移动电话的视窗操作系统公诸于世，将能运行像硅谷Visto、Good Technology、SEVEN及Intellisync等独立软件公司的那些能让移动电话用户用手机收发电子邮件的程序。之前是一个非常忙碌的四月，SEVEN收购了芬兰对手Smartner、Visto达成了与世界最大移动运营商—Vodafone的业务合作并在加拿大与Rogers Wireless合作开始大量推出移动电子邮件服务。
短期来看，首先对于如今以黑莓手提设备掌控着移动电子邮件业务的加拿大RIM来说似乎是个坏消息(因其让人易于上瘾的特性，昵称“聪明莓”)。和那些小软件公司专门针对其缺陷的做法不同，RIM提供给主顾们的是一整套的服务，既有软件也有硬件。这样对各方面的控制让RIM较早地确立了领先地位。
图片越大就越吸引人。然而即使其仅有300万用户，且其中大多为飞来飞去的企业经理，RIM已经是极其成功了。这是和世界各地约1亿5千万依赖电子邮件工作、却还没有享用移动电子邮件服务的雇员们相比—更别说15亿拥有移动电话、喜欢文字信息并可能也愿意用电子邮件的用户了。去年卖出的6亿8千万手机中，仅有2千万能够兼容日历、通讯录以及电子邮件设备的所谓“智能手机”。
UBS分析家Pip Coburn说：“这一趋势发展还为时尚早—我们斗胆称之为初生牛犊”。他认为移动电子邮件是一项“杀手级应用”，因为它能够切近人们最强烈的心理和情感需求—渴望与他人保持联络(如果不能做到就会伴生社交隔绝的恐惧)以及移动的需求—由于人们已经知道如何用个人电脑收发电子邮件，相对来说很少有人想新学点儿什么。事实上，电子邮件很可能将很多移动运营商们期望用来挤倒3G无线网络的其它价格高昂的服务取代。电信业界领袖Andrew Odlyzko曾做过一项调查，让人们在假设中选择—使用电子邮件还是互联网全部内容：95%的人选择了电子邮件。
这里有几层暗示。Mr Coburn 认为，首先，“瑞士军刀”一样绝对包罗万象的手机成为趋势可能难以走得很远，致力于以声音、文字信息和电子邮件将人们联系起来的简单易懂又价格便宜的“无声智能手机”也许将最终在广阔的市场取得胜利。其次，对于软件业来说，这一领域还依旧是大大放开的。Intellisync的老板Woody Hobbs早在上世纪80年代就勾勒出个人电脑的类似情形。Apple随后就以个人硬件软件捆绑产品取得领先地位。然而最后，Apple还是输给了那些产品与微软操作系统相容的硬件制造商们。如今，RIM可能扮演的就是Apple;其他角色的彩排才刚刚开始。
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