T-Mobile Scraps Portal For Google
By Carlo Longino, Wed Jun 29 18:30:00 EEST 2005

The operator says it will ditch its T-Zones portal on a number of handsets and use Google as the home page instead to make users aware they can access the Internet from their devices.


T-Mobile will load several models of handsets with the Opera browser and use Google as its homepage, dropping its T-Zones portal on the devices. It's a curious announcement -- interesting not only in the implied admission its portal strategy failed, but also because company execs are casting the move as some great innovation. Who would have thought people didn't like being told by their operator what they could and couldn't access?

A board member from the operator said, "Too expensive, too complicated, too little use -- that's our clients' judgment about our current data services." Fair enough. And while any operator breaking down their walled garden deserves recognition, simply expecting people to jump on the Web on their mobile phone because it's got a Google screen, and have a good user experience, could be a little unrealistic. Futhermore, just because operators can't seem to figure out a lot of the time how to offer portals or services that people actually want to use, let alone find usable and reasonably priced, doesn't mean it's impossible.

This harkens back to a couple posts from last week. First, there's at least some realization from T-Mobile that the typical menu-driven portal is fundamentally flawed. Second, it really highlights the gulf between search and services.

To address the first point: yes, the endless menus are barely usable, but just saying, okay, we're done, and passing everything on to a search engine doesn't seem to be a solution that offers a great deal more usability. Levels of menus are being replaced with pages of search results and the often-frustrating search for content that renders properly on a mobile device and its small screen (advanced HTML-capable browser or no).

On the second point: it's not an either/or question; the best approach is for search and services to work in parallel, for open access to the Internet to live alongside a suite of well-designed services. Users shouldn't be forced to choose only from what their operator decides is suitable, but that shouldn't preclude operators from packaging popular services and content in a portal or application subscribers can use if they so desire.

I point again to Yahoo Mobile, which pulls together a number of services (including search) into one portal. Of course, Yahoo's roots are in search, which is the business of helping people find content on other people's services. A search engine (a successful one, anyway) wouldn't dream of locking users only to its own pages -- and neither should operators.

The portal strategy seems to come from some bastardization of the i-mode strategy, with operators believing that DoCoMo only lets users access pages and sites it approves. That's not the case, i-mode subscribers have open access, but DoCoMo was smart to give outside developers and content providers incentives to come into their ecosystem and become "official" suppliers: things like access to the billing system and listing in i-mode menus.

Lots of ideas have been kicked around on this site and elsewhere of how to make the mobile Internet better, more useful and more usable. Blindly pointing users to search isn't the answer, but then neither is building walls around what people can access.