Re: UKNM: WAP Numbers

[Richard Gale]

The main reason that I think that everyone in the industry is 'down-beat'

about WAP is that everyone knows that in its current format it perhaps has a

year left. WAP has really just been the learning curve for the industry and

should be seen as little else, it has taught the techies all about the

delivery issues, the producers all about the importance of context of

content/commerce and us marketing people the importance of not over hyping a

product so that the users are disappointed. Genie and Breathe have a lot to

answer for consumers have a low opinion of WAP.......the Internet on your

phone.....yeah right!


But the lessons that we have learnt with WAP will serve the whole industry

well with all the new generation of wireless applications that are being

worked on, and this recent report has many points in that we should take

note of if the same mistakes are not to be made again.


richard gale

marketing manager

365 corp plc


----- Original Message -----

From: "Tom Hume" <

tomfutureplatforms [dot] com

>

To: <

uk-netmarketingmail [dot] chinwag [dot] com

>

Sent: Monday, December 11, 2000 5:28 PM

Subject: Re: UKNM: WAP Numbers



At 17:03 11/12/2000 +0000, UKNM Digest wrote:

>WAP Usability Report was released at the World Tour event in London

>November 30. Conclusions:

>         - 70% of the users answered no when asked whether they would like

> to have

>a WAP phone within one year;

>         - even the simplest tasks take much too much time to provide any

>satisfaction to users;

>         - even after spending a week using a WAP phone, user performance

> remained

>appallingly low;

>         - WAP content was frequently designed for the Web and not for the

>requirements of the mobile medium, further reducing usability: repurposing

>didn't work when putting brochureware on the Web in 1994 and it doesn't

>work when fielding mobile services in 2000


The fact that 95% of WAP applications out there are dreadful doesn't imply

the medium is unworkable.


When the web was in its youth, exactly the same criticisms were levelled at

it - "no one wants it", "it takes too long", "it's slow", "it's limited".

Nielsen draws this parallel himself, in the sub-title of his report ("D�j�

Vu: 1994 All Over Again").


Compare the takeup of the WAP to that of the web, and it's really not too

shabby; according to Euromonitor there were just 385,000 UK net subscribers

in 1994 (within a year of the release of Mosaic - and many of them would

have been email/ftp users). Forrester put the number of active UK WAP

subscribers at 450,000 (which is at least in the same ballpark as figures

from the telcos: 75k for Vodafone and 400k for Cellnet, I don't have

figures for Orange), and we're just over a year from WAP's commercial

launch in the UK. So the growth rates of the web and WAP in the UK are

currently not too far apart - the comparison is a good one.


I'm personally quite surprised that people working in new media aren't more

upbeat in general about WAP, considering a fair few of them must have had

similar experiences with the web 3-5 years ago.



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