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| Subject: | Re: MobileLBSList: WAP/WML interoperable? |
| Date: |
09/08/2000 12:06:27 PM |
| From: |
Alistair Edwardes |
|
>Hype is Gartner Groupīs term. I think itīs an appropriate term for a
>key factor what drives IT. You have seen, I suspect, the Dilbert
>comics? Lots of IT managers (no offense to anyone out there!) are like
>Dilbertīs boss, driven by rumour (hype) and influenced by buzzwords.
>
But I'm not sure how decisive a factor that is on the ultimate acceptance of
an idea or technology. There is alot of hype about XML but underneath that
is a very strong model which satisfies a need within IT generally and at
precisely the right time. I think just looking at the technology that it's
clear it will be (is) sucsessful without needing to consider it in terms of
the gartner hyper-cycle.
That said, to be sucessful any idea needs to sold and that means
publicising and marketing it - hence hype. So that will always form a trace
of the lifecycle. Have you considered a Dawkin'sesque meme model? Where the
success of an idea (meme) is based on its ability to reproduce itself within
the environment in which it is 'released'? - just a though.
>> Wouldn't the shear investment in a technology be a better indicator?
>
>Not necessarily better, but also very interesting to look at. Free
>browsers may have a bigger impact on certain parts of IT than high-
>investment items such as mainframe software.
>
I kind of meant more in terms of market investment in companies and venture
capital investment. Though you may want to argue that the 'trough of
disolutionment' mirrors well the recent collapse in the value of many
dot.coms
>Yes and no. Base XML might stabilise (probably will) while XML dialects
>(say, football markup language) can be quite ephemeral.
>
That's what I meant - if XML fails then by extension don't GML and WML as
XML dialects also fail?
>In any case, I think most people interested in these IT guessing games
>are more concerned about "getting out of the trough" than in what
>happens awhen something stabilises.
>
Maybe but I wouldn't want to build a strategy based on say WAP only to find
two years down the line when I'm expecting to start seeing revenues that
instead everyone is using palm pilots and psions etc with some other IP
based protocol for their network layer. Hence if the mobile phone becomes a
legacy item then perhaps WAP does also.
>Which GI interop-related technologies do you think will get to the
>plateau??
>
General IT - XML (and XSLT), CORBA have reached the plateau - huge
investment relies on them
From outside the WAPForum it's really hard to say what will happened to WAP,
just because the development is so closed. Currently, at least at the front
end I don't think that it is a workable protocol. It's sucsess relies on
it's uptake by third parties to develop WAP sites, the ease of baseing
buisness models on it and the satisfaction of it's users. There seems to be
problems to enabling all of these and these problems are institutional and
political as well just flaws in the physical protocol. If it does survive it
will be a very different beast from what it is now. If I had to I'd put my
money behind the Java MIDLets - at least from the developers point of view
this is a far more flexible and exciting environment for building
applications. That said there still needs to be a network layer and that may
well be provided by WAP.
For GI - I guess this is a testing time for the OGC, considering the
interest in LBS. There seems to be quite a few parties duplicating each
others efforts. I think the ultimate sucsess will depend capturing this new
mass market, which will only be possible if it's found easy enough to use in
the first instance of basic application. I think if it's seen as too heavy
people will shy away from it - which would be a real shame. If light weight
but scalable OGC is accepted then I think that the complete OGIS
specification follows as a matter of course as applications become more
complex. This sought of assumes that LBS will generate a renaissance in GIS
generally.
I also personally think that a deciding factor for the sucsess of GML is how
soon it will support topology.
Anyway I think I've probably written too much now.
Regards Alistairs
>>
>> Cheers Alistair
>>
>> Alistair J Edwardes
>> Department of Geography
>> University of Edinburgh
>> Drummond Street
>> EDINBURGH EH8 9XP
>> Scotland, U.K.
>>
>
>
>Cheers,
>Mike Gould
>preANVIL: www.anvil.eu.com
>
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