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| Subject: | Re: MobileLBSList: Article slamming wireless web |
| Date: |
10/30/2000 08:40:03 AM |
| From: |
robert.cayzer@my.arthurandersen.com |
|
Hi,
My first posting here. But many names here seem familiar from other lists, so
hopefully mine is. Anyway, my (personal) two ringgit worth of ramblings:
. If I were to be asked whether it sucked today. I would say a resounding yes
but only to TODAY's products
. I remember testing it for the first time mid-last year and I thought, "Well
fantastic! But... there's got to be more to it than this!". And my finding was,
yes there is. But let's take put into the context of technology evolution by
looking at the past:
#Some of you might recall the PC phenomenon back in the early 80's. Then, those
who were accustomed to:
- reliable mainframe / mini-computer power,
- stable and compatible / tested applications
- large storage (20 megabytes Disk) and RAM (1MG)
thought these 640K floppy-enabled, 64K RAM glorified machines typewriters which
crashed every 2 hours were the abomination of the computer world. Those guys,
aka "old majority", complained because... they had something to compare it with.
#WAP sucks because almost all of us has a Unix or PC-net background, and we
think that **mobile phones** will be for surfing. If you do, you have to be
totally insane. Mobile phones are for voice communication and will be so for a
very very long time. WAP1.1 technology was aimed for phones because that is the
most ubiquitous technology around (plug&play). In the mid-term future, when the
supply chain mobile for handsets, appliance and terminals mirrors that of PCs,
then the usage for WAP is wide ranging well beyond phones moving into the field
of ubiquitous telematics and telemetric (reading and control for: machine to
machine, machine to consumer, M2M, M2C, C2M, C2M2M, C2M&M, etc) and further
afield: biomet and biotech.
In the mid 80's, these mainframe guys thought these more developed PCs was ideal
for similar things they were accustomed to: processing accounting information,
more flexible reporting and analysis of corporate data. Well it took almost 20
years for them (and everyone) that these things were actually primarily for
surfing the web, playing games, learning and most of all E-MAIL. Sanity check:
Q1: How many data entry operators do you have in your company as a percentage to
IT expenditure? Q2: How many new subscribers to the internet will be from home
users as opposed to busines?
The dead giants: Wang, DEC, DG, Bull, Tandem forgot one important market segment
- the real end-consumers. They also neglected the real ability for new
technology to enable ***lifestyle change***. As such, you will find that WE are
now the "old majority". And the mainframes? Oh they're still around - they're
mostly called UNIX servers nowadays.
#Yes, it does mean more format of content, but eventually a manageable array of
format. The mainframe world gasped in horror as stable network + heirarcichal
database systems were being challenge & replaced by rapidly changing
multi-platform vaguely-compatible relational, object-oriented systems. Do you
all recall the number of relational (and flat-file) players then?
Also, the PC's were seen as separate from mainframes and interoperability did
not make sense / not even enter as a suggestion. Likewise, the PC developers
didn't have much mainframe integration in mind until the advent of client-server
computing in the later part of the 80's. I'd be interested in hearing a CLEAR
wireless vision (much less a strategy) FROM AOL and Qwest... Recenly Qwest
thought that "it has enough wireless spectrum to build its wireless customer
base from 800,000 subscribers at the end of 2000 to about 4-5 million customers
over the next few years". 4 or 5 million in the next few years? That's less than
1% of the total global market at that time! (sigh)
It is noteworthy to see that leaders NTT Docomo did not have announce it's PC
portal strategy until 12 months into operation (when it joined with AOL Japan)
part 2 follows....
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