Why is the tech savvy community so willing to pay money for SMS when they're already paying for data services?
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M$5 Answers
Also, the messaging system is proprietary to the messaging service. Now there may be multiple-service-capable clients out there, but I haven't even looked into it, because of the first problem. But with SMS, I can message a lot more people than I can with Google Talk. The bonus for the IM, of course, is that I can message my friends on their computer from my phone and vice versa.
To address convenience and cost-effectiveness, with my IM it is near enough to instantaneous, and there is no additional cost beyond the data, so for me I would prefer that everyone had the data capabilities, and be signed up for Google Talk, and then I wouldn't have any more use for SMS.
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M$This has been common knowledge for years. Not once was I under the impression that paying 10 cents to transfer ~200 bytes was anything but pure profit. Nor was anyone else that thought of it at all.
People are willing to pay for it, because it is a value added service. I pay $5/month for an allotment of texts. Yes, it costs Verizon only 2 cents or something to provide this service for me. Yes, I think it is a ripoff, but the majority of people just pay the money for the service, and are happy with the service.
Due to this, the carriers have no reason to discontinue this means of charging for something that has almost no cost. So, yes, we will be stuck paying for texts for quite a while.
Have you ever paid $30 for a printer cable? Have you ever paid $15 for a music CD? These are items that have a tiny cost of production. The printer cable can be purchased online for under $1. but people pay $30+ for them at Best Buy all the time, because they can't wait, or are completely uninformed.
But, you see, Best Buy only has a monopoly of sorts when it comes to ignorant consumers and people who need something NOW regardless of the price... the phone companies form a sort of oligopoly - as long as all of them desire to price things like this, and they will, because it is so profitable for them, then we can not expect to get texts for free. We will either have to pay 10/15 cents for them, or pay $5-10 for an unlimited texts plan so we don't pay for high usage.
In the future, there may be a carrier that just includes texts in the service, and if so, they will likely see a nice boost in subscribers due to this... but they will also likely see their profit margins fall quite a bit. In fact, I bet there are accounting types that work for the cell phone companies that have done an analysis of which would get them more profit (free texts), and have probably determined that as long as everyone else charges for texts, making them free or really cheap loses them more profit than it is worth.
Lastly - not everyone can communicate with data services. I can use AIM on my phone, but it's a ridiculous kludge. Once I get a decent phone, I might or might not use data based services to talk to people. Not to mention, I don't pay for extra data, and if the rates for texts seems high, the rates for data are D:.
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M$
Agree with pretty much all of the above.
What the market will bear....
I think the days of charging for SMS are coming to an end though, now that options are opening up which will achieve the sort of userbase that will be competitive with the current adoption of SMS protocols.
Yep. And when it happens, it'll happen pretty quickly, I think. It might be a few years still, but that's very hard to judge. Eventually, almost everyone will have some sort of data plan on their phone. My bet is that SMS will suddenly start declining, 2 years later be 1/2 what it was, and then tail off from there. Why 2 years, 1/2? Well, the duration of phone contracts is it.
I do, however, think that the vestiges of SMS will remain for a long time to come, and my bet is that it will still be something that people pay for.
As for why some people accept the cost, the reason is simple - it's a relatively small cost on top of their existing cell plan, and it's useful to them, they don't have a choice (all providers charge monopoly rents on SMS services for some reason). And they can't turn it off because their peers expect it to work.
I suspect that what drives this is that some significant percentage of business cell phone users aren't paying their own way, and their companies have policies that allow SMS. And so they use it, because it's there. And then people who aren't in that situation are forced to adopt SMS because they have to interact with the people who get it, effectively, for free. And so they pay for it too. Most people aren't stubborn enough to just say no, I'm not going to accept SMS messages. And thus a dysfunctional market is born.
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M$
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M$
And worse, even if we know the shortcuts, like using Gmail or AIM to send SMS for free, most of the people we SMS with just can't handle that level of complexity (it was hard enough to convince them to learn how to text!).
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M$
