How Did Docomo Combine the Strength of the Mobile Phone and the Pc-Internet?

1. How did DoCoMo create distinctive value at low cost?

How did DoCoMo combine the strength of the mobile phone and the PC-Internet?

DoCoMo’s strategy of technological innovation, price reduction and the launch of new services led to rapid expansion of the Japanese mobile phone market so the market was moving to saturation. Therefore, DoCoMo shifted its vision from focusing on physical goods to communication, information, knowledge and entertainment (its “Volume to Value” strategy) and developed the “Electronic Concierge” service in order to allow users to access pre-selected websites through their own mobile phone which could not be accessed before, and by that gave a significant innovative advantage. The new service, supporting the “Internet Worldwide” model, is an open network that can be accessed with a variety of devices. DoCoMo adopted the c-HTML for its new service so that content providers could transform easily their PC-based websites into a new version supported by DoCoMo’s new service in order to make the technology commonly used by content providers, which extended DoCoMo’s partners and content suppliers.

The PC-Internet and the mobile phones were two different entities with no connection until the introducing of the i-mode by DoCoMo in February 1999. Enoki, a former electrical engineer at DoCoMo said “the ‘I’ representing ‘interactive’, ‘Internet’ and the pronoun ‘I’” which is reflected the new vision of the firm’s new service. Introducing of the i-mode made users connected to the internet using their mobile in which they could access their e-mails and download pages from the web besides making their regular phone calls. Therefore, the i-mode service had a real value to customer using two different entities in one device.

DoCoMo’s strategy of technological innovation, price reduction and the launch of new services led to rapid expansion of the Japanese mobile phone market so the market was moving to saturation. Therefore, DoCoMo shifted its vision from focusing on physical goods to communication, information, knowledge and entertainment (its “Volume to Value” strategy) and developed the “Electronic Concierge” service in order to allow users to access pre-selected websites through their own mobile phone which could not be accessed before, and by that gave a significant innovative advantage. The new service, supporting the “Internet Worldwide” model, is an open network that can be accessed with a variety of devices. DoCoMo adopted the c-HTML for its new service so that content providers could transform easily their PC-based websites into a new version supported by DoCoMo’s new service in order to make the technology commonly used by content providers, which extended DoCoMo’s partners and content suppliers.