Don’t Ignore The Least Common Denominator July 21, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Mobile, startups.Tags: least common denominator, SMS, text messaging
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Good post by Fred Wilson on the ubiquity and ease-of-use of SMS messaging: Don’t Ignore The Least Common Denominator. Two points worth adding:
- SMS is completely portable across the world, which is particularly important in developing countries where the majority of consumers cannot afford fancy smart phones.
- It’s quite easy to get ubiquitous access via SMS to devices because of (a) SMS aggregators and (b) email interfaces to SMS.
Personally, I’m a big fan of SMS and it has played a role in the two mobile startups I’ve worked with. I take many Facebook actions through SMS. It’s much more efficient that logging in to the web site. I’d use it for Twitter also if there was a smarter way to reduce the volume of messages. One of the great benefits of SMS is that it is not that widely used and hence there is a lot less clutter there than on email.
[...] ignoring the lowest common denominator. In this case he’s talking about SMS and Twitter. Simeon Simeonov concurs, and its easy to agree with this approach, but let me be a dissenting voice on this kind of [...]
The SmoothSpan blogger wrote several hundred words but didn’t say much – other than he disagrees with Fred Wilson, his thesis is somewhat less than clear.
Scoble also attacked European mobile players recently for ‘being stuck in the SMS rut’ …
Yes, some nice day (around the Year 3000) everyone and his hamster will have ubiquitous and fast mobile broadband, flat affordable data tariffs (and data roaming tariffs), and insanely capable smartphones. I am all for developing tomorrow’s amazing apps and admire some of themobile visionaries and their early products.
However, I would like to see more sober views from responsible analysts and opinion leaders instead of hype-driven excitement. And less of the rather premature pronouncements of the iminnent death of SMS – the most successful mobile application, ever.