Why Mobile Services Fail

An interesting report on the views of Scott Jenson, who claims “mobile services like WAP and MMS were set up to fail because designers looked backwards at past successes instead of forward to new, untried ways to use mobile media”. He compares the situation to the beginning of film: “The first moviemakers nailed cameras to stages. Cinema didn’t blossom until D.W. Griffith used close-ups and sophisticated editing to invent the language of film. Jenson thinks the same kind of thinking has prevented WAP and MMS from replicating the accidental success of texting.” Pehaps…but there’s certainly a lot of innovation in these two areas, just rarely from the carriers. But the concept of “default thinking” is a good one to be aware of, even if just to avoid falling into the trap yourself…

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