SMS vs. IM (USA vs. Europe?)

I ran across this summary of a fascinating study that suggests that instant messaging is starting to take over from SMS among the younger crowd.

This goes along with a point I've been making about the different mobile markets, especially USA vs. Japan/Korea vs. Western Europe: these markets are structured differently, which results in their different uses. Voice calls are cheap in the US and we spend a lot of time driving, so we have strong voice demand. Western Europe had very expensive voice calls and Internet connections when SMS was young and cheap, and SMS took off there. Japan has long train rides in which talking is considered impolite, so non-voice is important; a very large chunk of iMode use is the equivalent to (but not actually) SMS.

One thing I find especially interesting about the above report is it was run by Orange: not a US operator at all. So this is not some hokey "Americans are addicted to IM" type finding. Tomi Ahonen who regularly reports on SMS statistics, including in the US. He regularly asserts that US SMS usage follows in lockstep with Europe, except with a 4 year delay. Is it possible that Europe will follow IM in lockstep with the US, except with some sort of delay? And what happens when they collide?

I’d thought long and hard about the different pricing structures for SMS in the US vs. The Rest of the Known World race, but I hadn’t considered the driving aspect. Could the pricing be a result of the lesser desire due to driving? Or is the pricing an attempt to curb text messaging during driving?

I think that long distance was a commodity by the time mobile hit the stage in the U.S., and home computers with dial-up access were prevalent. So US users were accustomed to email and cheap voice … and had to pay for incoming minutes. So they used their computers for text-like things and the home lines for voice – at least until voice minute costs came down. Then there was the coverage issue: the silly things had to work reliably. Too bad some of the US population and much of its land area doesn’t have that. (side note: Russian operators covering 97% of their population hold me in awe, even if it is only 78% of the geography)

European users were accustomed to expensive computer Internet access, so SMS (a throw-away product) was great.

Japanese companies didn’t implement SMS, and Japanese users had very little space in their lives for privacy and personalization (check out Japanese credit card designs if you disagree). Add to that a 1-2 hour train ride with no voice, and those nifty personal devices that iMode (designed as a stopgap until the network could be upgraded, and targeted at teenage girls) was the right product in the right context.

Now European Internet access is roughly equivalent to U.S. access, but the phone saturation is higher.

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