Simon’s Blog

There were over one trillion SMS text messages sent globally in 2005. That’s over 1,000,000,000,000 messages - or, on average, over 150 messages for each person on the planet. It’s easy to see how the numbers add up - I’m not a particularly heavy SMS user, but even I send around a thousand SMS texts per year. Given that each message costs money to send, these are pretty incredible numbers; and they represent huge revenues for mobile carriers around the world.

And yet, the usability of SMS is not close to where it could be - and that’s a barrier to use. I wonder if we’ll start to see mobile handset companies and/or mobile operators start to think seriously about differentiating themselves on SMS ease of use? Or even just thinking about increasing the numbers across the industry by introduction of new standards relating to usability. If you think about e-mail for example, we’ve come quite a long way in terms of features and usability over the last twenty years.

Maybe it’s time we saw the pace of innovation in SMS increase a little. Imagine what those numbers might be, if composing and managing SMS text messages was as easy as e-mail…