SEATTLE-Some 1,900 wireless data professionals gathered in Seattle last week to determine what future their long-struggling industry might have at Wireless APPS ’97.
In this muggy Emerald City, they found the yellow brick road to the future of wireless data is indeed changing. Attendees left with two ruby shoes to click together that will bring them back home: the knowledge that wireless e-mail is the “killer app” of data (or at least the closest thing to it) and that the time has come to leave behind the technological focus and embrace a marketing one in its place. Above all, the call for leadership echoed throughout.
Not a lot of lip service was given to which technology should be used over the other and why. Instead, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association’s Wireless APPS ’97 took a decided stance away from all the techno-talk that has dominated the wireless data industry to date and decided as an industry to push forward with a focus on marketing, letting the technology be somewhat of an aside.
Technological complexity and high costs are together the industry’s Wicked Witch of the West, and only the proper marketing of the wireless data products has the potency to water her and watch her melt away.
Dick Lynch, executive vice president and chief technical officer of Bell Atlantic Mobile and president of the CDPD Forum, perhaps landed the biggest bombshell of the show, announcing that the CDPD Forum is no longer.
It’s now called the Wireless Data Forum, a symbolic move placing attention on the shift of focus from technology to marketing.
“It’s time to take us technologists out of the loop and put marketers into the loop,” he said. “Now is the time to focus the organization on marketing wireless data to the masses. It’s time to stop worrying about the technology.”
In a market long dominated by voice applications, the wireless industry has a seen its younger sibling of data applications grow from a sickly infancy to its awkward teenage years. Continued growth depends on bringing the product to market.
To accomplish this, industry experts pointed to focus on the similarities of the industry, and not the differences in technology.
Lynch compared the state of data today to that of the automobile industry’s early years. Cars, he said, didn’t all have the gas pedal in the same place and had different steering methods. It took a while for the automotive industry to standardize. But cars all got people from A to B and that is what sold them, not the technology behind it. Wireless data should do the same, he said.
“In the end, the point we need to take away from here is … there’s got to be a common look and feel on the ends” and not what is in the middle.
David Sutcliff, chief executive officer of Sierra Wireless, said wireless data has created a better mousetrap, technology-wise. “We have to take that better mousetrap and show … how it can make a difference,” he said. “Our job now as an industry is to go to market, not wait for the market to come to us.”
One of the better-attended panel sessions of the show was called “Marketing is the Answer.” Moderator Chuck Napier, vice president of business development at Convergence Corp., led a panel of marketers who all agreed that a spirit of cooperation will grow the market, not over-competitiveness with each other.
The mistake made early on was the assumption that “wireless data existed, and therefore it was good” and it would be adopted naturally. But new things don’t get adopted because they are inherently good, but because people need a reason beyond that to buy it.
The panel defined these reasons as:
Enhanced efficiency and productivity
Enhanced customer service
Enhanced employee safety.
They pointed out that nowhere in these reasons are technological specifications, which serve only to confuse the customer.
What technological discussion existed revolved around wireless e-mail, coronated the “killer app.” The data messaging capability of e-mail is considered a powerful weapon for the wireless data industry, but only if wielded correctly. For wireless operators to compete and complement wireline operators, they must provide the same type of services at the same speed available in wireline. Then they will actually have something to offer.
But just throwing e-mail out there won’t cut it. There are certain rules that apply.
“It has to be simple,” said Kendra VanderMeulen, senior vice president and general manager of AT&T Wireless Services Inc.’s Wireless Service Data Division. Customers want to buy data and use data with the same ease as they currently do cellular, because cellular is what people have come to expect, she said.
Also important is the type of e-mail made accessible and, perhaps more importantly, the ability to filter out unwanted e-mail. “The Web is both a blessing and a curse for the wireless industry,” said Alan Reiter, president of Wireless Internet and Mobile Computing. It has plenty of information, but is just as readily available from wireline operators. He asked why people would pay to get certain types of information wirelessly when they can get same for free via a wireline service?
Developers must identify what type of information is most desired on a wireless/mobile basis, Reiter noted. A path to this is developing a service that allows the user to customize the information sent, and not sent, to him. After all, who knows better than the individual customer what he or she wants to receive?
Once defined, Reiter stressed the information must then be accessible. Road directions, for example, need to be available and accurate. Reiter related an experience where he entered his address and that of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., the White House, to get directions between the two. Neither address was listed.
Airlink fragmentation was also a technology issue. Carriers want to combine a simple data service with their existing voice applications to then present a complete communications package, incorporating both voice and data. But they will not do so until the data aspect is as easy and ubiquitous as voice is, or at least close to it.
John Stanton, chief executive officer of Western Wireless Corp., pointed to network gaps and airlink fragmentation as a problem, and touted open standards as a solution.
“We need to focus as an industry toward greater ubiquity,” he said. “We need to have the capability of all networks to deliver services to customers while they’re traveling.”
However, the reality is that a highly fragmented airlink does exist, and subscriber device manufacturers need some type of standard to build around.
The call for leadership rang forth for an operator to step up to the plate and pick a standard to use, then manufacturers can build around that standard.
Where there’s leadership, there’s cooperation, and cooperation is something the industry needs to move forward.
“We’ve got a lot to learn from the paging industry,” said one executive. “We have seen an industry kill itself rather than develop elements of cooperation.”
