One, two, three, four, five, six...
No, wait! This is not blog for kindergarten kids. I was just counting
the number of messaging apps on my phone.
- The native messaging app
that comes along in the phone
- WhatsApp
- Google Hangout (earlier
Gtalk)
- Facebook Messenger
- Skpe
- WeChat (till sometime
back)
Previously,
I also had Viber. Like WeChat I removed it. How many do you have?
Couple of
days back, BSNL, India's telecom behemoth, announced the winding up of probably
the original SMS in India.
The news
made me wonder if SMS as a native app will also meet the same fate. The short
life of Short Messaging Service?
Do I need
six apps for messaging? What differentiation does SMS anyway bring to the
table?
Cost did
you say? Probably,
there was a time when the number of free SMS used to be a differentiating
factor while choosing a plan. For years now, I haven't kept track of SMS
usage.
Does it
work cheaper then say an IP based Messenger such as WhatsApp? I seriously don't know.
Actually, I don't care.
In one of
my previous jobs, my colleague and I had a discussion about the low cost PR
agencies which spoilt the market for a large, high-fee charging national
agencies. I told her that such low cost
agencies are good for national agencies because without them the value that a
national agency with its reach and good trained manpower is never realized by
clients. Similarly, even if SMS is cheaper, I presume, users will prefer
messaging tool that provides them greater user experience.
I always
had trouble sending an image though MMS, the superior cousin of
SMS. But with WhatsApp, it is a breeze!
It is
also much more cooler to use the messaging apps then a plain vanilla SMS app.
Yes, I know SMS Pro type apps spruce up the native app but then why
bother?
I can't
think of any reason as to why I would want to use SMS. Internet on mobile is a
reality and will certainly become ubiquitous. Other certainty is that every
phone will be "smart" in some ways or other supporting such messaging
apps.
What
happens to my alerts regarding bank, credit card or any other utilities? Tough one. Isn't there a
way that that can be accommodated in CRM for customer contact? See, there's a
business opportunity for some!
Somehow I
am not able to convince myself that SMS, in its current form, will last. Would
it?
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