“Goodbye, SMS. You won’t be missed,” Evan Niu reports for The Motley Fool. “You’re behind the times, overpriced, and users have little choice but to pay for expensive plans or even more expensive per-message usage fees.”
“This is why I welcome the news that Skype has agreed to acquire group-messaging startup GroupMe for $85 million, even as Skype itself is still in the process of being acquired by Microsoft for $8.5 billion,” Niu reports. “GroupMe’s group messaging and conference call app will likely be deeply integrated into Windows Phone 7 at some point in response to Apple’s own iMessage service announced in June.”
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Niu reports, “The biggest beneficiaries of such competition and innovation will be you and me, while those with the most to lose will be incumbent service providers like AT&T and Verizon… SMS texting plans have long been a pure profit cash cow for carriers, generating estimated worldwide revenue of $5 billion. The antiquated technology has virtually no costs for carriers, yet users are forced to pay for expensive plans. AT&T’s fear recently manifested itself when the company eliminated its lower-priced texting plan. Last year, AT&T’s total revenue was $124.3 billion, and Verizon’s total revenue came in at $106.5 billion. Losing this revenue stream is unlikely to have any meaningful impact on the companies’ overall results, but no one likes losing free money.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: SMS is a scam. Good riddance. Data are data.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]