NTT DoCoMo is liquidating its machine-to-machine unit, and rolling back some of the services it offered into other areas of the group.

This sort of application (dubbed M2M by Nokia) has always interested me - I've noticed over the last 2 years that I get really worked up about the stuff that's so unsexy and unfashionable that it just gets taken for granted as part of our everyday lives, and could fit well into this category.

Orange in particular have been talking about M2M for a few years now, but beyond announcements of call plans devoted to M2M I've not heard much from them about it...

But why are DoCoMo moving away, and can we presume that others will follow their lead? Or is the reason that we hear so little about M2M precisely because it's so un-pressworthy?

Comments

[Walter Adamson]

DoCoMo is not liquidating the business but liquidating the entity, perhaps to make the business more core to the main business.

See my analysis of item 5 on this page:

http://www.imodestrategy.com/#50102-2

[Tom Hume]

Hmm, I'm not clear on what the difference is between liquidating a business and liquidating an entity. They both sound very 20s mobster to me...

Shutting down a business unit seems like a very downbeat way of showing that you want to put more effort into the area it was covering, but maybe I'm being commercially naive.