Cost of Ownership and Walled Gardens – A Compound Problem

Cost of Ownership and Walled-Gardens… not a good thing. I previously wrote about how Cost of Ownership (COO) is a stumbling block for the mass adoption of advanced handset services (services beyond text messaging). Combine COO with a closed (walled garden) offering, and the problem is now a compound problem.

MVNO Mobile ESPN is a perfect scenario of this — it is too expensive, and it is a closed or walled-garden system. Mossberg has written a good review of ESPN's mobile service… Even hard-core fans will sooner or later figure this out, and as Mossber nicely summarizes it, "it’s not worth the trade-offs in price, hassle and Web restrictions."

It doesn't matter how great a solution, service or offering is, if it is not affordable, and if it is closed, it will have a hard time getting adopted. Unless your target end-users are kids, let the end-user go to whatever website, or download whatever application he or she wants. Even in the case of Disney Mobile, which primarily will target kids, access to the web should be open, but controlled by the parents and not the MVNO.

[Via MocoNews]