BARCELONA, Spain - Mobile carriers should make their services easier to use, or they could lose business to media giants like Google, Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin advised at the Mobile World Conference.
Sarin admitted that his industry's biggest failure has been in making new mobile services appealing to users.
"We have lots of very complicated tariffs out there," he said at the conference.
Sarin said the services often are expensive, slow, difficult to find and even more difficult to use, which is not the way for carriers to keep their growing global audience of 3 billion people.
"If you get this wrong, the upside will still be enormous, but it won't be realized by us," he said.
Companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Ask are developing mobile services in an effort to surpass the media experiences offered by mobile carriers.
Google's mobile maps application has been wildly popular on supported phones, as have its mobile versions of Gmail and mobile search.
It is rumored that Google has been working on a way to provide easy mobile-content sales and circumvent carriers in the lucrative ringtone, wallpaper and downloadable-game markets.
Ask.com has been building its own mobile offerings, including GPS widgets that provide real-time driving or walking directions, business searches and invitation viewing through Evite.
Companies also are going after other aspects of the mobile market.
Google and Yahoo! are working toward enabling companies, including small independent developers, to create new services for mobile users and put potential business into the hands of everyone, excluding carriers.
Google has started rolling out its open-source operating system Android, which makes it easier to provide a plethora of Google-powered services to mobile users.
Yahoo! has announced plans to introduce a mobile software-development kit to enable developers to write widgets for several mobile phones.
"Customers want social networking, email, SMS, instant messaging, voice - you name it," Sarin said at the World Mobile Conference. "Communication is our core business. We have to be in all of these spaces."
