Now that the excitement over the WWDC Keynote has died down, people are beginning to think about the new features and what they will mean. One interesting take on that is that iMessages is really a very disruptive technology. There are plenty of folks yawning and mumbling about how it’s nothing more than Apple’s version of Rim’s BBM and, anyway, who cares? And if you do care, haven’t you heard about GTalk and WhatsApp?
What those yawning are missing, I think, is that fact that iMessages is (reportedly) transparent. The user will fire up the Messaging app as always but if the recipient is another IOS device it will use iMessages instead of SMS. There are 200 million IOS devices deployed now so on the day that IOS 5 is released, the carriers are going to lose a bunch of revenue. To be sure some of those IOS users will be texting folks on other platforms but there’s going to be a lot of IOS-to-IOS messaging and the carriers won’t be getting a piece of it. Now add in the fact that Android will certainly do something similar and it’s easy to imagine the bottom dropping out of the SMS market.
Many people are excited and happy about that prospect. Over at TechCrunch, MG Siegler is enjoying a bit of schadenfreude at the carriers’ expense. As he correctly points out, SMS is tremendously overpriced, especially when you consider that it uses a control channel and is essentially cost-free for the carriers.
Fabrizio Capobianco over at Mobile Open Source says that SMS is going away. He predicts that the revenues from SMS are going to disappear and suggests that the carriers move up the food chain while they can. Capobianco and Siegler agree that it’s going to take a while for SMS to go away and, really, it probably won’t completely—after all, it’s just there so why not leave it? I do agree with them that the huge profits from it will soon be a thing of the past.
On the other hand, I’m not sure that any glee is called for. If the carriers lose the SMS profits, they will surely try to regain them through increased fees in other areas. Then everyone, whether or not they text, will be paying more.
Still, I see this as another step towards the oft predicted commoditization of cell service. A march that ends with the carriers providing a bit pipe and little more.