Text message fate: Born in accidental death is also desolate

On the New Year's Day in 2015, many people in the WeChat circle of friends have brushed up on New Year's greetings. The first thing Weibo had heard was the tragedy on the Bund. Different media have different functions, different applications have different fates, and in fact the most unpopular is the short message. This tool that once used SMS as a "new year's vulgar" operator has no one to care about.

SMS rises and falls in China, and the speed of disappearance is amazing

Text messages have gone, not just festive New Year's text messages are few, even in peacetime, fewer and fewer people use SMS as a necessary means of communication, this is the progress of the information age, but also the destiny of any kind of business.

According to data records, the inventor of mobile text messages is Finns, because the Nordic people's feelings are more subtle, do not like to express by phone, so invented a short message on the idea. In 1992, the world’s first SMS was successfully sent to mobile phones through the PC on the Wal-Mart GSM network in the UK. However, the basic functions that this mobile phone must have have not been able to flourish in the West until it arrived in China, and the West did not shine brightly.

It is said that China's mobile communication network had the SMS function in 1994, but it really began to enter the consumer's field of vision in 1998. In 2000, the volume of mobile phone short messages in China exceeded 1 billion; in 2001, it reached 18.9 billion; 2004 In the year, the number has skyrocketed to 90 billion, and in 2012, the nation’s mobile messaging volume reached 897.31 billion. However, it was also from that time that text messages quickly embarked on the decline.

The most representative of these is New Year's greetings, New Year's Day and other New Year's Day are the peak of New Year's text messages, and even cause the operator's network to crash. But now, SMS has become a thing of the past. The data shows that during the Spring Festival of 2014, the total volume of mobile SMS sent nationwide has reached 18.21 billion, which has dropped sharply for the first time. According to the calculation, the year-on-year decrease was 41.57%. On New Year's Eve, the volume of shipments reached 11.04 billion, a decrease of 8.0% year-on-year.

We can completely abandon the data forecast, because with the New Year's Day message sent just past the point of view, the upcoming New Year's Day of the Spring Festival of the SMS sent will be negligible. After 15 years of brilliance in China, SMS has withdrawn from the stage of history between two or three years. It is actually not normal.

The prosperity and decline of SMS are related to social changes

At the time of the rise of SMS, China was a more subtle country like Northern Europe, and mobile communications at that time was an era of high prices. It is precisely because of these two that text messages have gone through prosperity in China, and the end of the two has also directly led to the decline of text messages.

In the initial stage of mobile communication, where only the telephone and text messages were used, people had to endure two-way charges and telephone charges of 0.4 yuan per minute. At that time, the per capita income of the Chinese people was only a few hundred dollars. Therefore, birth is one-way charge and relatively cheap. Much of the SMS became the first choice for people's communication, and it actually promoted the popularity of mobile phones. But now, the price of speech continues to be almost free, and traffic is starting to replace voice. Text messages must be charged, and even begin to become expensive. It is normal for no one to use it.

The Chinese society is constantly changing, and that implicit China is gradually disappearing. Unlike the first batch of mobile phone users before the 1990s and the second batch of mobile phone users during the peak of the decade, today’s The generation has long since abandoned the implicit and advocating personality, directness, and richness. This has caused SMS to gradually lose its market among young people. The simple and direct way of communication, such as WeChat, Michao, and Momo, has replaced the simple necessity of SMS. trend.

Looking at these two aspects, the decline of SMS actually has a close relationship with operators and is related to communication technologies. Operators have not responded to changes in customer needs to transform short messages. Until recently, China Mobile launched converged communications.

Operators adhering to the traditional taste of communications marketing, resulting in high message prices, until the consumer gave up did not change, so it is equal to the operator to give up SMS.

The decline of text messages but not to die, but was conspired by multiple collusion

At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, Xu Da, a general of the Ming Dynasty, was suffering from back pain. Although he was seriously ill and died, but the emperor Zhu Yuanzhang had sent something that he had not eaten, causing General Xu Da not to eat tearfully to eat the goose and died. Although SMS has been defeated under the impact of new technologies, consumers' habits are still in use. According to the normal business life cycle, they can survive for some time. However, they have to eat alcohol.

SMS is sent peer-to-peer, and SMS has the ability to force open, so it has become a weapon for business marketing, but this weapon will also hurt himself. Since the hot-spoken message has always been accompanied by the problem of spam messages, the relevant departments have not yet been able to provide an accurate definition of spam messages, but only with targeted changes in the pressure of public opinion, this is not Scales with no rules to fight the message eventually let it start to decline.

What's more serious is that because of cracking down on commercial spam messages associated with operators, it has promoted the proliferation of pseudo-base stations. However, pseudo-base stations have obviously given a bit of salt to smears on text messages, resulting in even more surging public opinions. Regulators began to take part in the management of text messages. They used spam messages to throw normal text messages into the garbage dump. Dirty water is spilled and the child is gone. The consequences are just making fraudulent calls and selling phones more popular.

It's not just unscrupulous merchants and fraudsters, but smart phone manufacturers. In the previous era of feature phones, SMS icons were firmly controlled by operators. However, smart phone manufacturers now help consumers classify management through the setting of operating systems and UI controls, as well as the intelligent identification of software. Shielded, so SMS really didn’t have its day.

Text messages have been declining until the end of a year or two and are leaving in a buzz. This is indeed a tragedy. The old and new replacement is the law of history, but the fact that the wall is pushed down by the crowds is not the end of text messaging.

If you want to renew your message, it's completely free.

In the 4G era, operators will definitely abandon their voice services and traditional value-added services and turn to traffic management. The replacement of SMS by mobile Internet services is inevitable. It is in this case that China Mobile has launched converged communications. Equivalent to declare to give up SMS in the future.

However, the history of SMS has not yet ended. Demand still exists, especially for those who rely on 2G networks and older SMS-dependent people. If operators decisively abandon SMS income or SMS, they can also keep active text messages. Time, although the impact of income is not small, it can be able to retain the stickiness of these customers, the future of "new information" also has the opportunity for a smooth transition.

Many people may think that once the SMS is released, it will inevitably lead to the proliferation of spam messages. However, if operators already have a mature and strict SMS management system, they will have the conditions for implementing free SMS. Voice can already be free. Why can't SMS be?