4 ms·

Our decision to build on top of SMS/MMS... ...was a really bad idea. SMS dates from 1984 and was originally a hack -- a beautiful hack, yes, but still a hack -

Our decision to build on top of SMS/MMS... ...was a really bad idea. SMS dates from 1984 and was originally a hack -- a beautiful hack, yes, but still a hack -- to squeeze basic text into empty 128-byte slots in telco switching protocol SS7. Combining multiple SMSes together requires nasty User Data Header hackery, and transmitting binary data over this joke of a channel is even worse. And don't get me started on MMS, a horribly overcomplicated spec that neither handsets nor operators could ever implement correctly, much less interoperably. I used to work on this stuff for a living, and ran away screaming as soon as I could. The mobile messaging world would be a good ten years ahead of where we are today if we'd copied Japan in the mid-1990s and ditched SMS/MMS entirely for email built on packet-switched data, which would have instantly created the decent infrastructure needed for future apps. (The packet-switched bit, that is, not SMTP itself.) But as always, Japan shot itself in both feet by refusing to adopt the same standards as the rest of the world, meaning that e-mail and decent Internet on phones didn't become a mass-market thing elsewhere until the iPhone came out in 2007.

sizzle 13y ago
This is fascinating, got a blog we can read?
- jpatokal 13y ago
  Thanks! I blog at http://gyrovague.com/ http://gyrovague.com/, although my telco days are long behind me so that's the one topic I haven't covered. Might be time for a retrospective...
  - sizzle 13y ago
    I would certainly read that reflective post, if you ever do write it you should definitely submit it. The discussion would be great I'd imagine.
aeberbach 13y ago
If you look just at the handsets available in 2000 or so it would have been very easy for Japanese telcos to look at what the world had to offer and conclude it was not much. Compare turn of the century Japanese devices* next to four-color phones like the Siemens S25 and Motorola's monochrome handsets. If you want to blame anyone for not pushing adoption of GSM GPRS and beyond it shouldn't be Japan. There's one country that could have made it the obvious choice for everyone, but thanks to "competition" it never happened... *i.e. J-Phone Sharp J-SH04 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-SH04 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-SH04
- jpatokal 13y ago
  Not following you here -- Japan never had GSM, and even their initial attempts at 3G (FOMA, CDMA2000) didn't play ball with the rest of the world. At the end of the day, the problem in the Western world was that operators were so in love with their massive SMS revenues with nearly 100% profit margins that they had zero incentive (well, negative incentive, really) to push for anything else. Whereas Japan, precisely thanks to not adopting GSM, never had SMS in the first place, so e-mail charged by the byte became the first killer cross-operator messaging app. (There were SMS equivalents in Japanese networks as well, but most all were restricted to one operator and consequently never really took off.)
  - aeberbach 13y ago
    Sure - what I mean is had Japan been the only place not to have GSM they may well have been forced to adopt it. GSM was around in the USA at that time (Moto Timeport "Worldphone" etc.) but was nothing like a standard, everywhere I looked I saw CDMA.
    - rodgerd 13y ago
      > everywhere I looked I saw CDMA. That's a very provincial "everywhere", then.

sizzle 13y ago

This is fascinating, got a blog we can read?

jpatokal 13y ago
Thanks! I blog at http://gyrovague.com/ http://gyrovague.com/, although my telco days are long behind me so that's the one topic I haven't covered. Might be time for a retrospective...
- sizzle 13y ago
  I would certainly read that reflective post, if you ever do write it you should definitely submit it. The discussion would be great I'd imagine.

aeberbach 13y ago

If you look just at the handsets available in 2000 or so it would have been very easy for Japanese telcos to look at what the world had to offer and conclude it was not much. Compare turn of the century Japanese devices* next to four-color phones like the Siemens S25 and Motorola's monochrome handsets. If you want to blame anyone for not pushing adoption of GSM GPRS and beyond it shouldn't be Japan. There's one country that could have made it the obvious choice for everyone, but thanks to "competition" it never happened... *i.e. J-Phone Sharp J-SH04 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-SH04 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-SH04

jpatokal 13y ago
Not following you here -- Japan never had GSM, and even their initial attempts at 3G (FOMA, CDMA2000) didn't play ball with the rest of the world. At the end of the day, the problem in the Western world was that operators were so in love with their massive SMS revenues with nearly 100% profit margins that they had zero incentive (well, negative incentive, really) to push for anything else. Whereas Japan, precisely thanks to not adopting GSM, never had SMS in the first place, so e-mail charged by the byte became the first killer cross-operator messaging app. (There were SMS equivalents in Japanese networks as well, but most all were restricted to one operator and consequently never really took off.)
- aeberbach 13y ago
  Sure - what I mean is had Japan been the only place not to have GSM they may well have been forced to adopt it. GSM was around in the USA at that time (Moto Timeport "Worldphone" etc.) but was nothing like a standard, everywhere I looked I saw CDMA.
  - rodgerd 13y ago
    > everywhere I looked I saw CDMA. That's a very provincial "everywhere", then.