This time it will be different – MTN

Bradley Prior

Bradley Prior

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This time it will be different – MTN

MTN recently announced that it will launch a new instant messaging service in all of its markets, including South Africa.

MTN Group CEO Rob Shuter said the IM service would form part of the company’s mobile money portfolio and function as the “WeChat of Africa”, enabling mobile payments for the unbanked and underbanked.
 
mercury12 said:
What a waste of money.
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MTN should just buy WhatsApp - it will be less expensive than developing "WeChat of Africa"

So MTN is admitting that they squandered a huge messaging advantage.
MTN was first with SMS and MMS and NokNok - why did they not develop that into Instance Message before WhatsApp had any market share?

The service was built and designed by MTN itself, which the company said will allow it to continuously respond to customer needs, changes in context, or improvements in technology.
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Based on the poor website that MTN have, this will be a failure.
 
Maybe we will see a headline in 2 years... That time wasn't different..

In all seriousness.. Mobile operators are terrible at understanding the consumer. They think in terms of large capital deployments and are used to the monopoly it provides. When competing in a competitive market deployment of capital is not enough and they always seem surprised when money doesn't solve the problem. Even with this - they are not trying to solve a customer need - they are trying to solve their own problems by trying to launch a messenger service in a market with a million options already. Network operators are not consumer businesses - they think and behave and act like utilities - which they are. They need to wake up to that fact and stop pretending otherwise.
 
Duh, it's gonna fail... we all know this, you know this.... so why are you wasting this money?
 
Could work in the rest of Africa. These mobile money services are very popular north of SA.
 
I agree, MTN's IM “WeChat of Africa” will flop and there are many basic easy to predict reasons:
  1. Successful IM apps like WhatsApp are successful because of widespread adoption (that has taken years): even if MTN has the best IM app with the best features, people will continue to use other IM apps that already have widespread adoption (WhatsApp and a few others), it will take years before MTN's IM app gains any significant traction and by that time the IM apps that have widespread adoption would have evolved to be at least as good as MTN thinks its app might be.
  2. People are already overloaded with too many apps interrupting with popup notifications all the time, any new IM app is likely to met with a "Meh" reaction especially when very few people are using it.
MTN Group CEO Rob Shuter said the IM service would form part of the company’s mobile money portfolio and function as the “WeChat of Africa”, enabling mobile payments for the unbanked and underbanked.
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MTN should not be marketing this as an IM app, clearly MTN wants to use this app to make money out of doing money transfers throughout Africa, so emphasise that this is a money transfer app (that has some IM functionality), people might use the money transfer functionality. MTN's IM app will never gain the traction that existing IM apps like WhatsApp already have.

ThinkCentre said:
Will not work as MTN does not have the biggest amount of users in South Africa.
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Based on the article, it seems MTN thinks its “WeChat of Africa” will gain traction throughout Africa (not just South Africa).
 
MTN said:
“NokNok launched in 2007 and was based on an GSMA IMPS off-the-shelf platform, it was shut off in 2011 with just over one million registered users in South Africa,” MTN told MyBroadband.
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The Verge said:
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus all suffered substantial downtime last night, reports The Verge.
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Durov's Channel said:
I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.

Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.
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Telegram reached more in one night, than NokNok reached in 4 years . So good luck, MTN.
 
Trying to be African again rather than going with what already works.
 
Maybe maybe not. Whatsapp is slowly sliding down the pile of being too complicated, full of so-called added features and unnecessary bloatware additions.

Like so many other useful apps before it.

Whatsapp at start ---> 23MB
Whatsapp now -----> 58MB
Added value? maybe encryption but that is all

So if MTN comes up with a simple easy to use service, these bloated over fat apps will die just like the ones before died. And good riddance too when that happens.
 
Geoff.D said:
Maybe maybe not. Whatsapp is slowly sliding down the pile of being too complicated, full of so-called added features and unnecessary bloatware additions.

Like so many other useful apps before it.

Whatsapp at start ---> 23MB
Whatsapp now -----> 58MB
Added value? maybe encryption but that is all

So if MTN comes up with a simple easy to use service, these bloated over fat apps will die just like the ones before died. And good riddance too when that happens.
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Won't be eMpTyN. The problem with all these apps is that they only fragment the market. I'm waiting for the next Jabber like app that will give us interoperability again and also not tie you down to just a phone number.
 
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