>On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Benjamin Kowarsch wrote:
>
>> Remember, there is nothing wrong with WAP, as long as the charging regime
>> you are using is accepted by your user base.
>
>Now this is ironic. One of the reasons for WAP's failure is that,
>unlike Docomo's cHTML, WAP is its own independent standard that isn't
>interoperable at all with HTML.
Fair enough. However, the difference between WAP and PDC is that WAP was
defined and adopted by many countries, whereas PDC remains confined to
Japan only.
>So in Japan, the home of those terrible Meji-era folks who hate standards,
>I can get a keitai that will let me quite happily read my own home
>page, and I can test out my pages designed for keitai on a standard web
>browser. If I buy one of these so-called "standard" WAP phones, I lose
>both those abilities.
>
>I've regularly cursed those those "s-t-u-p-i-d" "Meji-era" WAP folks
>for deciding to come up with their own new and different standard...
There are pros and cons both for cHTML and WAP. I am not saying that one is
better than the other. What I was pointing at, was that most people seem to
believe that WAP was a market failure because of the protocol itself, where
it was the charging regime that kept it at bay.
Also, Meiji-era Japan, would have very likely adopted GSM or CDMA if there
had been any such thing. After all it goes by the name Meiji Restauration,
referring to restoring Japan as a member of the international community
again after having been cut off for almost 4 centuries, in the *pre*-Meiji
era. ;-)
Today's Japan would probably benefit from even a little bit more of that
Meiji spirit (and less of the pre-Meiji one).
I know this one is off-topic but quite interesting: I saw a feature on NHK
1 the other day, in which the Japanese themselves criticised the Japanese
industry for not adopting international washing machine standards (ISO/IEC
?), which has resulted in major export markets to either have vanished or
being put in danger of following those which already have vanished. The
Koreans (again) had abandonded their domestic standard in favour for
ISO/IEC (not entirely sure which standards body it was) and they had taken
over virtually all the traditional Japanese export markets.
NHK filmed at a standards committee meeting in Kyushu where the Japanese
presented their proposal (prototype) to ISO/IEC (?) and it became clear
that it didn't stand a chance. NHK were not very friendly to the Japanese
industry spokesman who came to the studio to make a fool out of himself (or
rather the orginisation he represented) facing the the criticism.
regards
benjamin
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Received on Tue Jul 31 13:03:32 2001