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?