What is wrong in multimedia messaging?

Experts in the mobile industry had forecast that multimedia messaging would soon be as successful as text messaging. However, recent studies have shown the opposite: usage and interest in MMS have reduced dramatically in the UK and US during this year. Several reasons have been mentioned: lack of interoperability; too high pricing; poor usability; low penetration; lack of attractive use cases. Beside these, the operator has to cope with various other factors, from network and economics to marketing and customers' needs. Because all these factors interfere, it is overwhelmingly difficult to analyze their implications to an operator's business using any other than a holistic approach. We describe a holistic view to MMS user experience and present a model that can be used to analyze how different factors influence operator's business through end-users' experiences and behaviors, and what is the relative importance of the factors in this respect. We illustrate the model with an example person-to-person multimedia messaging case.