"SMS" -- the world's biggest brand?

Adam Bird of Esendex is in Monte Carlo at the Global Messaging Congress. He posted the following report on this page last night and I made a note to highlight it this morning.

Have a read..

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Ewan,

Currently at Global Messaging 2007 in Monte Carlo. My job has its rough assignments, but this isn’t one of them. Saw Steven van Zanen of LogicaCMG, sorry Acision, speak today on SMS 2.0 and the development required get to SMS 3.0.

The thrust of his presentation was that the mobile operators were acting like rabbits in headlights in the face of the Mobile IM hype. Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL where playing the ‘my community’s bigger than yours’ game and trying to wade into the mobile market by essentially replicating the IM experience in mobile.

Regular readers will probably all atest to the fact that the mobile internet is no where near the reliability experience of the fixed line alternative and that you cannot rely on the network always being there. Existing PC IM solutions essentially make that assumption.

Stefan’s view, or that of the major vendor of SMS kit, was that SMS was still the best experience on town. You can’t beat a community of 2 billion subscribers or put another way one third of the global population. It works on every handset, ignoring the US of course, and all operators need to do is augment the existing experience with IM type features and MSN, etc will not be able to compete.

It is going to be an interesting battleground over the coming months.

Two other quotes I liked:

‘SMS is the biggest brand in the world’
‘SMS is the only mobile data service that has been successful’

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Adam, thanks for writing — very interesting indeed. I particularly liked the ‘SMS is the biggest brand’ quote. Strictly speaking, I don’t agree with the reality — it’s not a brand, you can’t buy and own ‘SMS’ — but I most certainly agree with the sentiment.