Mobile Entrepreneurs & Mobile Operators – The Challenge
We caught an interesting post yesterday from Rafe Needleman on CNET about a panel that took place at last week’s Under the Radar conference.
The panel, “No filters: Ask the carriers anything,” according to Rafe, went downhill pretty quickly. The panel, consisting of representatives from U.S. wireless carriers Verizon Wireless, Alltell, T-Mobile, and AT&T, were basically on defense mode.
Entrepreneurs in the audience – many who have to constantly plead with carriers to add their services – challenged the carriers to open their gates and let them offer their services. Seems like a fair request to us. One of the spokespeople for a carrier countered with a good point, though. When an app doesn’t work, the developer doesn’t get the phone call, the carrier does. True but aren’t there ways to bypass this? A middleman workaround was discussed where developers would develop the app then have someone else bargain with the carriers. Still, it all depends on what the carrier agrees to at the end of the day, not how cool the app is.
Rafe ended his post with:
“..In the meantime, some of the carriers just aren’t going to budge. If you want to get your cool new app on all the mainstream phones, there’s no easy way. There are, though, other opportunities to work with the mobile carriers, if you’re looking for a business to start…”
We recently blogged about this same hesitancy of carriers to allow developers to add their apps to their “walled gardens” and still believe the same thing: If carriers are to remain competitive they need to let up a bit and start working with developers – they are missing out on opportunities and revenue. The iPhone has proven that users will be increasingly demanding more apps from their providers – what about the rest of the phones out there?
What would the desktop software market look like if the ISP’s put the same controls on software that goes onto computers?
