LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.-Laissez-faire capitalists repeatedly faced off with supporters of de facto or government-mandated high-technology standards during last week’s Mobile Insights ’97 conference on mobile computing.
The three-day meeting, held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel here and hosted by industry consultant Gerry Purdy and his Mountain View, Calif.-based MobileInsights organization, brought together some 350 industry participants.
Microsoft Corp. representatives took to the podium to expound on their mission of building industry momentum through commonality and collaboration by rallying manufacturers around the Windows CE platform. “We’re very troubled” by the Nokia 9000 Communicator, said Jon Magill, director of marketing for consumer appliances at Microsoft. The Communicator uses Geoworks GEOS operating system, one of many mobile product platforms that are serving to confuse the marketplace, Magill commented.
On a panel one day later, Grover Righter, vice president of marketing at Geoworks, responded there is plenty of room for multiple platforms and the real key to industry success is creating suitable end-user applications.
Yet Rhonda Dirvin, director of wireless market development at Motorola Corp., laid responsibility for the demise of Motorola’s Marco personal communicator on the dueling OS factor. The Marco was based on General Magic Inc.’s Magic Cap OS and appealed to a broad range of business users, she said. Those customers, however, were unable to use Marco to access their corporate databases because their was no internal MIS support for the Magic Cap interface. “We didn’t think all the way through the problem of how we can make someone’s life easier,” Dirvin added.
James Bartlett, IBM Corp.’s director of worldwide strategy and offerings, said users need a simple interface that also integrates all of their communications services, including online operations, cellular, cable TV and telephony, on a single bill. Bartlett called for a ubiquitous wireless standard and ample bandwidth to accommodate the demands of intensive multimedia-rich applications.
However, several wireless industry experts attending the show claimed competing standards are not significant detriments to wireless data expansion. The industry is hiding behind the standards’ issue, stated Geoworks’ Righter.
Many software writers agree. Data Critical Corp., which initially wrote data applications for paging networks, has adapted its software to the Global System for Mobile communications platform. Its EKG monitoring application can be used with the Nokia 9000 Communicator or Hewlett-Packard Co.s HP700LX equipped with a Nokia PC Card modem and cellular phone.
GSM is the clear winner in digital technology internationally, said Jeff Brown, Data Critical’s president and chief executive. But he added, “We’ll write applications for any technology.”
Ralph Haller, president of Fox Ridge Communications and former head of the Federal Communications Commissions Private Radio Bureau, defended the FCC’s decision to not set a national digital standard. He claimed such a move would have hamstrung the wireless industry in the long term. Haller predicted the advent of frequency-agile and air interface-agile devices that will be able to work on whichever network users choose. Haller also noted that bandwidth should not hold back wireless data development since PCS carriers in particular could easily aggregate their frequencies to provide wireless multimedia if they wanted. Nonetheless, he lamented the fact that PCS carriers are stubbornly following the cellular voice business plan and not pursuing innovative data offerings.
