Well, I’d like to say I disagree, but I can’t. And I write this as someone who wants RCS to work so that we can integrate Dial2Do with some of the elements it offers.
Anyway – the boffins with bigger brains than ours have firmly stuck the boot in over at the Telco 2.0 Blog on RCS and indeed, IMS. Forgetting about IMS for now, I have much sympathy for their concerns with RCS. In addition to their gripes, I’ll re-state some of my concerns:
- No internet player is involved with the IMS RCS initiative. Saying “well it’s free for anyone to join” is *not* an answer. Someone needs to get out of their chair and talk to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, …anyone who is a player in IM and get them involved. Without that, what you have is the world’s smallest IM ghetto. Why is this hard to understand?
- Even if you cannot get them involved, surely you should take best practise as it is now from the IM world regarding presence and status, and just re-use it? That should make some of the meetings shorter and help get to market faster.
- You know that by the time you ship RCS there will perhaps be 500M people or more who’s first experience with IM with have been with Google, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, Skype, Facebook or someone else? You know they’re going to look at your version and go “how do I include my current IM friends”? And then when they hear the answer, they’ll never, ever use it again? See my first point.
- And lastly, what *is* the obsession with video? Seen a lot of people doing video telephony recently? Even MMS has been remarkably slow and low in takeup! Get real.
Rant over.
Sean,
Humble as we are compared to the Telco 2.0 guys, I also share their concerns.
To not include real internet players, is to ignore the real convergence that’s ongoing between the traditional IT &Telco verticals.
Unless we really open up to other players we’re doomed to repeat the lessons not yet learned from WAP, Walled gardens, etc. A quick look over our shoulder and we see very successful examples of new mobile revenues but most of these are in areas such as the iPhone and it’s APPs store.
A quick look inside our industry and we see declining ARPU’s and exploding bandwidth.
Any one care to pick the likely winner here if the status quo remains locked back in the mindset of the 1980′s standards bodies?