Critical mass of installed base of phones. Content providers and software developers are interested in a large target market for their services. SMS was standardized in 1995 and took off in 1999, Smart Messaging was first implemented by Nokia in 1997 and started to take off in 2000. All of the vendors in the industry must call the EMS functionality by the same brand name. In the same way, Ericsson has indicated to Mobile Streams that they may call EMS eSMS to indicate that it is related to SMS but enhanced.
Indicative pricing is useful.
One of the reasons why SMS was so successful is that the price levels were fairly clear and standard between networks- approximately 15 US cents became and stayed the defacto price per SMS for several years. This was originally based on a comparison with voice mail tariffs. Mobile Streams believes that end users will be willing to pay a premium for enhanced messages over plain text messages as a reflection of the novelty associated with the sound effects, animations and the like. This price will come down over time. Mobile Streams recommends that 1 EMS is priced as per 2 SMS in other words that the price of an enhanced message is twice that charged for a text message.