Dean Bubley: All-or-nothing technologies, IM, presence and IMS

Dean Bubley posts at the Disruptive Wireless blog about all or nothing technologies, which he defines as "they either work fantastically well - or not at all. There's no middle ground. So, if everyone has them, they're standardised, and people use them appropriately - they're great. Think SMS here. This is the all."

He then states that "alternatively, they're poorly standardised, not ubiquitous, implemented in different ways of varying user-friendliness, and non-interoperable with alternatives. Nobody uses them. Think MMS. This is the nothing."

He then goes on to state that there "are technologies which are either so simple, or so open, that they can thrive with adoption rates in the middle. Multiple different implementations and standards can work in (relative) harmony with a bit of glue - gateways, aggregation servers and the like. Voice telephony is one of these. It doesn't matter if you use PSTN, GSM, CDMA, SIP-VoIP, H323, Skype, Cisco or (almost) a tin can on a string. You can still talk to everyone else. Email is another."

Bubley writes:

I reckon that mobile presence is dangerously close to being all-or-nothing. It's great if 100% of people in a community use it 100% of the time, updating their status information regularly. But if 90% of people use it 90% of the time, it starts to become irritating. At 80%/80% you have to put up with a whole bunch of inconvenience, even before you consider interoperability issues. Below that it's worse than useless. Even the attempts to second-guess some of the status information into smart network-resident applications won't cut it sufficiently in my view. Too many "false positives" - yes, you're theoretically available, but in reality you've bumped into your boss in the corridor & don't want an interruption. Or you've nipped to the bathroom & didn't change your status first.

Attempts to knit together different mobile IM/presence domains won't work either, unless there's a transparent (and free) interconnection with Internet/PC based ones. Again, it's all-or-nothing. Interestly, the Internet IM presence model isn't all or nothing. With plenty of screen real-estate and a decent multi-tasking OS, there's nothing stopping people overcoming interoperability/uptake issues by the simple expedient of having multiple apps running simultaneously. This won't work in mobile as long as some people have operator-provided handsets with second-rate Internet IM interconnection, and others use single-tasking featurephones.

On the subject of IMS, Bubley opines that "it's now patently obvious that the mobile world is never going to be all-IMS. There too much legacy, too many alternatives that bypass it, and too many operator-specific partial implementations rather than the whole shooting match. And of course, my pet topic...no phones. In other words, if it's an all-or-nothing technology.... it ain't gonna be "all"." He concludes with:

So there's an interesting set of questions about how IMS behaves in a heterogeneous world. The best "vision" I've heard that can potentially extricate IMS from this mess is the idea of an "ocean" of Internet/IP applications, with "islands" of IMS floating in it, offering particular value-adds like QoS, integrated billing and so forth. In other words, it's best to position IMS as a platform for selected "premium IP services", rather than the current worldview of IMS as a repository for "all mainsteam IP services, with a gateway to that nasty uncontrolled other stuff for the real pain-in-the-butt customers we don't really 'own'".