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| Subject: | Re: MobileLBSList: WAP/WML interoperable? |
| Date: |
09/09/2000 08:26:48 AM |
| From: |
Gould Carlson Michael |
|
Mensaje citado por: Alistair Edwardes <aje@geo.ed.ac.uk>:
>
> >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 is easily said in hindsight, as XML has stabilised now. I remember
a few years back all sorts of big IT companies were jumping on the XML
bandwagon while showing little more than glossy promotional websites,
no software developed. Was it hype back then? Probably.
SVG, in my humble opinion, is also technically sound, and should have
proceeded more quickly to stabilisation/adoption. But the multiple
developers (competitors in the end) seem to have delayed the process
(ver 1.0 took forever to come out) by each insisting on doing things
its own way. This has created a nonstable environment which is scaring
developers. Why has Netscape/Mozilla still not brought out SVG support
for example???
And in the end the most technically sound solution does not always
necessarily survive over the alternatives...
>
> 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.
We'd be interested in looking at that model, sure, but remember that we
are not given the liberty of exhaustive scientific analysis in our
preANVIL project. In fact that may be counterproductive.
>
> >> 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.
I don't think we can really marry services to platforms in that way.
WAP (or iMode or SMS) needs to hold its own regardless of how Psion,
Palm, Nokia and other handset providers' business is doing. I suspect
the mobile phone will become a legacy item, but we have serious
questions about teh service provision standards and software.
>
> >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
What about the general argument out there that Corba is technologically
sound but too darn complex to implement? Might people give up if a
similar, simply Distrib Computing Platform comes along?
> >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.
Supposing WAP is fine for now, for how long to see its shelf life? 2
years? More? Do big mobile-IT players put all (or most) of their eggs
in that basket?
>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.
And other simple XML+Java solutions are out there, waiting to be
discovered, I suspect.
>
> 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 |
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