"Text" Is BIG Business.

At least it is when we're talking about "pocket" text. "SMS," or Short Messaging Service, hasn't yet caught on in the U.S., but along with my last bill, my cellular provider offered a couple of months of free SMS service, trying to get people interested. Why? Because as the Feb. 22 NetNews explains, even in this day of spiffy desktop color graphics and ergonomic PC keyboards, a pocket phone's short monochrome lines of hard-to-read text, and its very hard-to-use phone keypad for entering text messages, represents far more than pocket change!

In the UK for example, people sent just under one billion text messages -- last month! At an average price of 14-cents per message, that's revenue of over $144 million -- per month. Revenue that's derived from the already-existing cellular phone infrastructure. No wonder U.S. carriers are trying to get us interested.

The headlines from the Mobile Data Association's press page at http://www.mda-mobiledata.org/resource/press.asp provide an interesting history of how text messaging has been growing in the UK, and an August, 2000 article (http://www.text.it/presroom/manilla.htm) gives us a hint of how, in some countries such as the Philippines, pocket text messaging is already instrumental in changing the social fabric:

"Muslim insurgents battling Philippine troops in the south have a new weapon. When the shelling and gunfire let up, they send a barrage of scathing insults to Manila's forces by cell phone. "There is a text war among the MILF and our forces," said Brig. Gen. Eliseo Rio Jr., referring to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the larger of two rebel groups fighting for an independent state. "Our soldiers are texting insults to the MILF. And the MILF are sending the insults back.""

So -- don't discount the lowly text message. As people in many countries are already demonstrating, we are endlessly adaptable in making surprising use of even "mundane" technology. And that can be a very big business.

This is an excerpt from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing, " a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical Staff for the Corporate Strategy group at Compaq. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc . Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2000, Compaq Computer Corp."