Walt Mossberg takes on the cellular industry. He's right
By Carol McGarry, Schwartz EVP, who heads our wireless practice
Every good PR person is an advocate for their client. As I work with clients, I inevitably find that I am caught up in the excitement of bringing their innovation to market. I'm infected by the enthusiasm and determination of my clients. And when my clients run into business reversals, I share their disappointment.
So when I saw a recent article by Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal, I felt compelled to write to him. This article was not about the latest cool gadget. He wrote about the domination of the wireless carriers here in the U.S. and their impact on innovation. He said:
A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.
His words struck a chord. I remembered Wildfire Communications, whose technology was one of the very first speech recognition interfaces, launched in 1994. It behaved like a human assistant by forwarding calls, announcing callers and all sorts of nifty and intuitive features for busy people. Guess which major carrier in the U.S. ended up buying that company? Nope, it was Orange, the innovative European provider. And my mobile phone's speech recognition is still less sophisticated than my Wildfire "assistant."
Seven years ago, a client who offers location technology articulated an exciting vision of services like this one. Imagine walking past your favorite store in your local mall and getting a message on your mobile phone telling you they're having a big sale and you get an additional 15 percent off every purchase. As a dedicated sales hound, I'd love to get a message like that (at no charge of course), but I don't get them now. My client had a software platform that would make it happen. So why don't we get messages like this on our phones now? Ask your service provider and I'll ask mine.
In Europe and Asia, consumers use their mobile phones to pay for various goods and services. Not here in the U.S. The list of innovative services that are not available to U.S. consumers is long, although the innovative technology to support them has already been created.
I've been involved in the wireless and telecom market for about 20 years now. I've worked with many clients here at the agency who've come up with fascinating innovations. Too many of those entrepreneurs did not succeed because the U.S. mobile providers have lagged so far behind the rest of the world in adopting innovation. Mossberg is right, it's time the industry changed its ways and opened itself up to true innovation.
Tags: communications, mossberg, telecom, wireless
Posted by Chuck Tanowitz on November 1, 2007 at 10:45 AM
