"MSN and Yahoo have allowed their Instant messenger (IM) users from India and 14 other countries to be able to invite and chat between each other beggining today. "
I see this as a crucial milestone in the death of the "per min" call rate concept we have known for so long.Seems illogical and out of this world right. I mean yes rates could fall to maybe even 50 ps per min to call to US but it should be "per min" right!!!! NO worng!!!!!!!
Do you pay for your mail on "'per min"? NO
Do you pay for yahoo messenger vocie chat "per min"? NO
Do you pay "per min" for sending the conventional letter? NO
Then why should mobile communications - which is a substitute to all these forms of comunications be any different?
The cost structure of a mobile company is never based on per minute, because mails/chats and voice calls are finally transported as packets of data over fiber optic networks. Hence they all should have the same measure and that measure is "Bytes/MB/Gb" - the measure of data.
So what does all this have to do with MSN and Yahoo? Imagine you have a mobile BB connection which is charged say Rs 500 per month for a 500 MB pack. And through this connection on your mobile you are always logged in to your Yahoo/MSN messenger. Now any person on Yahoo and MSN messenger friendlist can call you and talk to you for hrs "without any per min" charge.
But what about others you say? I say, very soon there will be no others. Just like the mobile revolution has allowed even your "bhajiwala" to own a mobile, the availibility of cheap calls will make the same "bhajiwala"have an IM login id. (Fresh_bhajiwala@yahoo.com :-))
The MSN-Yahoo partnership is a beggining. Today of the 400 mn worldwide users of IM 350 million are on Yahoo or MSN with and accounting for 70% of IM accounts in India. Thus the partnership makes the IM world borderless. With the giants in the fray the smaller players like AOL, Skype, ICQ all shall join the fray. Its in their benefit to do so, because unlike a mobile phone connection an IM id is easy to switch. So subscribers would find it very easy to switch to an IM service which is aprt of a larger IM consortium.
Thus the first milestone to seamlessly connect the current internet aware population on a "non- per min" world has been laid.
The real big leap shall come with the availibility of viable wireless BB solutions like WiMAX which shall be available by 2010. There are several hurdles to jump over right now and too many "technical impossibilities" visualised right now. But to all the skeptics I would just point out that in 2005 none of the sane people in the world would have forecasted a 100 million subscriber base in india in 5 years.
So "Insanities" today are the "miracles" of tomorrow. So dream on and ensure your dreams are classified "insane" today...........!!!!!!
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