http://www.onlineuniversalwork.com

Thank you for taking the time to explain yourself in a more civil manner in this forum, and for the apology for your prior comments that were not.

Mea culpa on the headline. I did not intend for anyone to take my headline literally as headlines are, by design, written with the intent to draw the reader into the article. As for the content of the original post, I think Neicole has written a brilliant analysis.

I appreciate the areas on which we have agreement and respect your opinion where we do not, as predictions are supposed to provoke thought and discussion. Nevertheless, I would encourage you to take future objects of your commentary in context and in their entirety.

After all, you certainly wouldn’t have wanted to base your thoughts on an essay like “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift solely upon its title:)

Mark

One really important thing I had intended to write to you but of course I had forgotten it by the time I hit [submit] was, that on the three points that he discusses in the article – that carriers in US have punitive policies tied to subsidies; that Apple could use some competition; and SMS spam ads are bad – I totally TOTALLY agree with those sentiments. That part is good, he has good ideas in his story. But why not write about those, and entitle his article accordingly. There is no possible way these three ‘kings’ could be deposed in a year or two, but they are worthwhile goals and over a longer while, they will actually happen there in the US market where mostly these matters have been far since passed in the more advanced parts of the mobile industry like Japan, Scandinavia etc.

He had good points within the story, but he did make that – sorry – silly title and outrageous claims. I did feel it my job to take him to task on those. Incidentially Mr Jaffe has also written to me on Twitter and we’ve had a very civil chat there, where he also seemed to suggest that he did not mean it to happen in 2010 haha… But I don’t want to put words in his mouth and he did not explicitly say he hadn’t meant it, so perhaps any readers who are interested can go read his comments to me from today and make up their own minds haha..

Thank you Neicole, cheers. Yeah, sleep helps bring balance

Tomi Ahonen

I also have the benefit of having read other of Mark’s postings, so I probably understood the context of his SMS posts more than you might.

FYI: with regard to the Nexus, I don’t think Mark was suggesting a $600 price for the unlocked phone. He was saying they might discount it heavily to make it affordable, and could do so because of their size and the ad revenues they expect to make.

In any case, I think you and are actually closer to agreement than our Twitter discussion suggested. We just applied the title differently, it seemed.

As for rudeness, thank you for the apology. 23 hours up will do that to you!

Thanks for blogging about our chat on Twitter yesterday. I appreciate the post and acknowledge you have done a fair representation of what we discussed and also appreciate the effort you went to to copy excerpts etc.

Now. To the original postings I made on Twitter, on Mark Jaffe’s article at the Mobile Marketing Watch. His article is clearly entitled “The Mobile Kings Will Lose Their Reigns in 2010″. It was not entitled ‘the kings will start to get some rivals’ or something like that. Clearly ‘kings’ to ‘lose their reigns in 2010′. That means – literally yes, I am taking this written commentary literally – literally in 2010.

If you now want to say, that Mark Jaffe posted that title but didn’t mean it, then you win. I have nothing more to say. But three kings he identified in the article – Carriers, Apps Stores and SMS ads – he said ‘lose their reigns in 2010′ and that means – they no longer are on top on December 31, 2010.

Now, it appears Mark Jaffe runs a consultancy that specializes in ‘breaking through to the next level’ as he says on his website. That is well in line with his provocative article title, suggesting that new champions will take the reign during 2010. He even suggests several of them but not all and not very clearly.

In his article he talks of Google’s ‘ad funded’ phones somehow usurping current US carrier phone sales models (with subsidies and 2 year annual contracts). This is the first king to go (carrier subsidised phones) and Google to be the suggested new king.

Then he suggests that Google’s app store will overtake the ‘king of kings’ of the Apple App Store – not stated explicitly, but implied if ‘three kings lose reign’ and Apple App Store is listed as ‘king of kings’ and Jaffe specifies that Google is doubling its sales within months already in 2009. What else can the reader expect, than that the king to lose its reign is this Apple App Store and during 2010 the only suggested replacement is Google app store?

And of the third king, SMS messaging based ads, Jaffe lists only what he calls ‘more interesting messaging technologies’ but does not even list them. He even says these are not yet deployed in 2009 but are ‘ready to deploy’. And yet this third king should succumb to these p0tential new rival messaging solutions during 2010.

Well. These three kings will not be deposed in 2010 and I said so in my first tweets. I think it is irresponsible to pose as an expert, write for a respected mobile industry publication like Mobile Marketing Watch and make such outrageous suggestions. And it shows a total lack of understanding of the mobile telecoms industry whether for the world or for the USA to suggest that Google ‘ad funded’ phones would obliterate the carrier subsidised phones market – this means that Americans would have to start to pay 600 dollars for iPhones for exmple rather than 200, won’t happen in a year.

Similarly the numbers are totally astronomically unfeasible for Google app store to bypass Apple app store, either globally, or in USA in one year. Astronomical scale involved. And of these mysterious new messaging services to overhaul SMS as ad channel during 2010 – won’t happen.

His article was completely wrong. He promised 3 kings to be disposed. He promised that in 2010. He said they were carrier cellphone handset sales, Apple app store and SMS ads. None of that will happen in 2010 nor in 2011. It is a long shot for 2012-2015 time scale under the best of odds.

If he wrote realistically and we would disagree about the future, I’d be happy to let the matter be. Who knows, its forecasting. But his three predictions are all totally beyond reason for 2010.

On Twitter yesterday I did take each of these 3 items individually and Twittered on each of the three, to my best ability, to show each of the three ‘kings’ are ’safe’ during 2010. Incidentially I would not bother to mention a given random ’single’ error of a given article, almost any mobile telecoms article has some errors. But he talked of ‘three’ kings and each of those three parts to his story were totally wrong. Not partially wrong, where this is potentially feasible, or part of that might happen in 2010. Totally wrong, so much so, it is totally impossible even for 2011 – even if you double his time scale for giving him 100% error margin – it still won’t happen to ANY of the three kings.

If I was not perfectly clear, I apologize. If you or your readers feel I was rude, I am sorry for that, I don’t like to be thought of as rude.

But Jaffe was totally wrong on all 3 counts. This was one of the most incompetent articles I have read in my long career in telecoms. These 3 kings will continue to reign in 2010 I can promise you that with all possible credibility my Oxford lecturing, my nine published books etc can muster. More than that, should it happen that one of these 3 kings somehow be deposed in 2010, I will be most happy to write into my next book in 2011 to acknowledge you Neicole and Mr Jaffe,and write that I was wrong in January 2010 and you two were right.

I kind of doubt Jaffe would be writing in his next book that Tomi Ahonen was right and he was wrong in each of his three predicitions for 2010.

Fair?

Tomi Ahonen
http://www.tomiahonen.com

I wonder the broader implications of this. We are already in information overload, it’s just going to get worse — what are the implications for how we read and what we read?