From: "Daniel Scuka" <daniel@japaninc.com>
> Remember back in the wireline Net's early days (c. 1994-95) when
> Web-to-email gateways were briefly popular? Lots of companies still didn't
> provide browser-based Web access, but they did provide email. When I first
> joined Fuji Xerox in 1996, we still used the Xerox-designed Star
workstation
> (no browser). I remember looking for Web-to-mail and FTP-to-mail gateways
> that would deliver files from FTP archives or allow me to send Star-mail
> messages to colleagues at other companies that had SMTP or X.25 mail. It
was
> fun, but the mail paradigm -- send a message/receive a message (perhaps
with
> a file attached) -- is fundamentally clunky.
I'm probably looking too hard for various story-morals, here, but I couldn't
help finding it ironic that one of the leading edge technology offerings of
the early 80s - the Xerox Star - didn't have a web browser in the mid-90s.
(Even pre-Mosaic, lots of other workstation-class platforms did.) Also
that Xerox was still having trouble letting go of its braindamaged
brainchild.
Ironic, but predictable. The #1 objection to the demo-model Star that
showed up at the CS department at UC Berkeley back then was: "Where
are the programming tools? How can we develop for this thing?" Answer:
"You don't. We do." How to die in the marketplace, but live forever
as a legend in your own (corporate) mind.
> As soon as companies (FX included) deployed browsers on all desktops,
usage
> of whatever-to-mail gateways dropped right off (I'd be curious to hear if
> anyone still uses them).
Umm...I'm recently on the JavaHz mailing list, and AFAIK, this is the only
way
to get older messages. (And that's just mail-archive-to-mail - or maybe
I'm missing an archive link in my reading?)
> The same will happen to SMS when mobile surfers in Europe have a browser
> keitai in which the browser integrates and supports easy-to-use browsing,
> SMTP (or IMAP4) mail, and GUI services like access to Web storage or to
> intranet file servers, as well as offer cool i-mode-, EZWeb-, or
J-Sky-like
> services. In other words, they are sufficiently different technologies
that
> the same aims **can't** be met.
Not with SMS, per se, I guess. But perhaps with SMS re-envisioned
to have the functionality of....well, how about a protocol like HTTP?
And with SMS/e-mail clients that look suspiciously like browsers?
A sort of end-run around WAP?
If the history of software tells us anything, it's that new wine-bottle
labels can be printed up fast, but ...no wine before its time..
Alcatel, Motorola, Siemens - these are not big names in the history
of unstoppable-wave de facto standards. A side-note in the recent
break-off of M&A talk between Alcatel and Lucent (formerly, Bell
Labs): for all its marketing wimpiness, Lucent, at one-third the market
cap of Alcatel, still towers head and shoulders above Alcatel as
an R&D powerhouse. Siemens has likewise left me unimpressed
over the years. Motorola is roughly in their class. So I wouldn't
expect anything promethean from this troika. Pressed hard, they'll
go with what works, even as they name it - and trumpet it - as
something new and different. (It will be different, I'm sure, but
only gratuitously.)
[Jeff: I didn't see Ericsson in the story - your slip or theirs?]
-m
leap@gol.com
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Thu May 31 11:36:25 2001