• Ars Technica, Thursday, February 14, 2008 10:45 AM

Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin warned mobile carriers to make their services easier and cheaper to use or they risk handing over their a lucrative portion of their business to companies like Google. He said mobile carriers have done a particularly poor job of making their services attractive to users; failing to fix that would be the industry's biggest mistake

"We have lots of very complicated tariffs out there," Sarin said, adding that mobile services are often expensive, slow, and difficult both to find and use. "If you get [mobile services] wrong, the upside will still be enormous, but it won't be realized by us."

Indeed, the "upside" will be realized by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, which continue to develop new services while striking deals to prominently feature their services, which offer a far better user experience on mobile phones. Google, for example, has developed easy-to-use mobile versions of its search, mapping and email applications and is said to be working on a service that facilitates mobile sales transactions. Android, Google's forthcoming mobile OS, will seamlessly link together all of these services, providing a more personalized mobile Web experience for its users.

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