SMS Messaging will Never Work!

When GSM mobile phones first came to the market, I was one of four Regional Managers, working for a huge company. Each of us, with a team of Area Managers, covered a quarter of the UK. We were a good team – two ladies, two men, very different temperaments, with a skill set that covered all the essential elements of running a successful organization. I like to think our HR department had chosen wisely, but experience suggests they got lucky!

One of my key skills was that I was the technical guy. We used to meet at head office once a month, and quite often we’d be issued with new kit, perhaps the latest IBM laptop, or maybe the very first PDA’s when they came onto the market. It was my job to spend time with whatever it was, to read the instruction manual and to let my colleagues know how to get the best out of them.

So back to the new mobile phones – our huge Motorola “brick” phones had been collected, and we had been issued with the new fangled GSM phones – remember them? They were the first to use Sim cards, they had single color screens, little aerials that pulled out, and batteries that lasted about three minutes!

We headed to our hotel for the evening and I promised the team I would study the manuals and tell them all about our new toys the following morning.

I chose the coffee break to do so, and I went through the key points, for example explaining that you could now store your contacts on either the card or the phone itself. Eventually I came to the part about SMS. I explained to the team that you could now use the phones to send short text messages. We discussed the idea for a few moments, and then agreed it was a ridiculous thought. “Why would anyone tap out a message, using their thumbs, on a tiny keyboard, when you can just call the person and speak to them!”

And so, four very intelligent, successful young executives, working for one of the world’s largest organizations, dismissed out of hand something that was to grow into and remains to this day, one of the biggest phenomena of the last dozen or so years. Our problem was that at that time mobile phones were almost exclusively used for business, with the bills being paid for by the companies that provided them. If we had realized for a moment that one day everybody would have a cell phone, and that they would use text messages to keep the costs down, then we may have seen the potential. We were thinking inside the box of our experience.

So what’s the point of this story? How does it relate to blogging? Well, I learned a lesson from the whole experience, and I want to share that lesson with you. There have been other “SMS” stories since – Twitter is one example, there are others to come and there may be some out there right now, just waiting to explode. The lesson is simple – keep an open mind about new stuff, try to avoid thinking about it only in relation to how things work now, think outside the box of your own experience.

Do you have any stories of missing out on great ideas? Do share!

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