Text Messaging Still Thriving Despite Smartphones, Twitter and WhatsApp

Summary: Many companies view SMS as legacy technology, and are bypassing it in favor of apps and new, non-carrier communication services like WhatsApp. The death of SMS is nowhere near, though.

The tech industry attracts the worst kind of futurists, Clayton Christensen-quoting types who behold shifting paradigms, looming inflection points and disruptive innovations everywhere they look.

The futurism business is so competitive these days that technologies get declared dying at the very moment they are actually peaking. In monarchy terms, that's like preparing tocrown the boy prince when the reigning king is a hale and hearty 40-something.

So it goes with text messaging, aka SMS. Nobody disputes that SMS is the king of mobile communications today. 7.8 trillion SMS messages were sent last year, according to Portio Research. Another firm, Informa, counted 5.9 trillion text messages worldwide last year, comprising 64% of mobile messaging traffic. You alsohave research showing that in developed countries,texting has just become more popularthan voice calling.

Not only is SMS on top, but it's still growing substantially. Portio predicted earlier this year that it will increase 23% this year to 9.6 trillion SMS messages.

According to Portio: "SMS is not dead. SMS is still the king and will remain so for some time to come."

Yet, many experts have already declared the death of SMS. Consumers don't care - they're too busy texting. And somecompanies are reaping the marketingbenefits(see Mobile Marketer for more North American case studies and Sybase 365 for the rest of the world).

But too many companies are being persuaded not to invest in SMS or its picture/video-enabled sibling, MMS, in favor of building native apps, or waiting to see what the mobile IM services or Twitter or even fast-rising 'free' Over-The-Top (OTT) services like WhatsApp.

I understand that there is a consumer desire for a cheaper alternative to SMS. ButI think that companies waiting for the death of SMS will wait for a lot longer than they expect. In the meantime, there will be huge costs, in the form of blown opportunities to exploit the right-time, contextual marketing capabilitiesof mobiletoday.

As much as I'm a champion of apps, they remain largely a first-world phenomenon. Globally, smartphones that can run apps were outsold by featurephones by 2:1 last year.

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Text Messaging Still Thriving Despite Smartphones, Twitter and WhatsApp