Do Consumers Care about Open Access?
Network World reports today that “consumers value customer service and price over open access.”
According to a new survey by Compete Inc., “93% of respondents said that getting a phone at a reasonable price was either important or very important to them,” while only 65% said the same about being able to switch carriers without buying a new phone.
I can’t find the original research online, but there are several problems with this article. One is math, but I’ll save that for a footnote.
The big problem is a hidden assumption: you can have cheap phones or you can have open access, but you can’t have both, so consumers will choose price.
Lots of people make this mistake, because they think open access is somehow tied to iPhones and Nokia N95s. But open access also means that you can switch carrier without having to buy a new phone. That saves you money; if you decide to buy a new phone, you can sell the old one or give it away. It’s better for the environment too. (In the UK, carriers offer cheaper plans to customers who bring their own phones.)
Most people in the US don’t know that this is possible, and in any case most customers don’t switch at the end of their contracts. So at Skydeck we are amazed that “65% of respondents said the ability to switch carriers without having to switch their phones was either important or very important, while 56% said the same about being able to access any content or applications they choose on their mobile phones.”
That’s the third problem with this article. The author doesn’t seem to realize that these percentages are huge. They are three times higher than I would have guessed, and far higher than the level of consumer interest in mobile Internet access, mobile video, games, ringtones, wallpaper, picture messaging, location-based services, or any other premium service that the cell phone companies actually offer.
In fact, if this survey is correct, more people in the US support the principle of ‘any application on any device’ than have ever actually downloaded an application for their phone. People are more likely to support open access than they are to send or receive text messages!
So here’s our first prediction for the New Year: 2008 will be the year when mainstream consumers in the US start to demand open access.
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The math problem is in the headline. If 93% of consumers say that X is important, and 65% say that Y is important, you can’t conclude that “consumers value X over Y.” Given those two numbers all you can say for certain is that up to 35% of people value X over Y. The rest may see them as equally important, or put Y ahead of X.