AOL was once synonymous with the World Wide Web. Even the mid-to-late ’90s’ most educated computer owner had challenges with understanding that America could go online without America Online.
The majority of PC owners with dial-up connectivity once lived within an AOL walled garden and could not smell the flowers just a few feet away. That wall was quickly torn down and so began an unparalleled new media innovation movement. The impact the free Web has had on social, security and communications controls and issues is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The wireless world is poised to experience a similar pattern.
The 400 lb. gorilla in the room that Cuban, Ellison, Gates, Schmidt and Jobs are aware of is the impending upside of US consumer off-deck wireless product and content consumption. Broadcast and space CPM-focused vanity content providers like Jamba have been kind to carriers with generous rev share models and ad tacks that ask for consumers to “text XYZ to 123″…they also act as an outsourced carrier advertiser, sending many consumers directly to their carrier’s deck to find the content just advertised by an off-deck provider competitor. But the market will bear and benefit from more than a purely transactional experience.
Carriers want to share the marketing costs of driving mobile content consumption, but they’re also concerned about quality. Google has moved consumers off-deck. iPhone will do the same. Many others will follow and we’ll enter a period of new opportunity and optimism that we haven’t seen for quite some time. We have or, in some cases, will have a true convergence device: interface interoperability and affordability, increased data-holding capacity, speedy network, sideloading/USB compatibility, great still and video capture capability, more availability of credible content and service providers focused on mobile, a mobile Web experience that consumers drive (not carriers) because of the off-deck options made available to them, and on and on…
Ramping and revving up once more–and we’ll do it again next year with LBS. Stay tuned…
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