Eric, I concur with you it's an import with a huge following. If Mixit is available for all operators, why should we bash safcom for launching it first? Sorry developers: Safaricom owes you nothing and having been in the industry long enough I can say with confidence, we expect our pitches to be treated preferentially for the simple fact that it's done locally. Issues of scalability, security are paramount and no operator will allow you to use their live network as a test bed. Secondly and even more painfully, 'the developers' are single clusters of people who have all the ideas and the code in their head (who happen to be very moody). They work when they want and don't bother them if they are not up to it. That has nothing to do with Safcom, the market is awash with unfinished projects and missing developers. Being a listed company they must do all they can to secure their numbers, period. Kiania On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 12:57 PM, Erik Hersman <erik@zungu.com> wrote:
Just to point out, Safaricom didn't create Mxit, they're importing this from South Africa. Basically, using their marketing muscle to get major inroads in the data space (as you pointed out). How is MTN SA losing KES 80M per day? Aren't they making some of that back on data charges alone? Mxit isn't tied to just one network, you can access it from anywhere you can get a data signal, so Zain and Yu will work here too.
Erik Hersman www.whiteafrican.com | @whiteafrican
On May 21, 2010, at 11:55 AM, David Kiania | Asentric Consulting Ltd wrote:
For all the flack Safcom gets on this list we have to give them marks for innovation and forethought. In today's newspaper they have launched Mixit (http://www.mxitlifestyle.com/) is a Peer-to-Peer IM client that runs on mobile-to-mobile and desktop-to-mobile. While some see this as cannibalizing SMS revenues, it's a stroke of genius because they still stand to make cash from the data traffic as opposed to loosing it to a competitor all together. (Rule No. 4 in business: Cannibalize your revenue and business model before your competition does it for you)
After declining to support Mixit as a product, MTN SA now looses more than 8M Rand (KES 80M) a day, and the sad part, the app runs on their platform on either gprs/edge.
Kudos Safaricom, You Rock!
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