On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Shiladitya 'Sunny' Ghosh wrote:
> Greetings. Just came across this interesting news-link in Boston Globe
> (Mobile firms link to set standards, boost sales Nearly 200 firms form
> alliance By Ben Klayman, Reuters, 6/12/2002 -
> http://digitalmass.boston.com/news/2002/06/12/wireless_alliance.html)
Um, yeah. right.
The most important value to consumers is that no matter what
device I have, no matter what service I'm going to get, no
matter what carrier I'm using, I can get get access to the
information. The consumer will see no issues of access to
content," Jon Prial, IBM's vice president of content, told
Reuters.
That sounds good. That would bring them to the level of Japan.
"The average person probably won't care for another two or
three years when the things that this alliance develops start
to show themselves on cell phones and mobile devices,"
Oops! Now the truth comes out. There is already a standard that
gives everyone easy access to information no matter what you're
using (so long as it's not an American or European cell phone).
It's called the web.
(Note that we also have a messaging standard that allows anybody
in the world [so long as you're not a European or American cell
phone user] to exchange messages, too. It's called e-mail.)
So either it's going to take them three years to stick a simple
little web browser into a phone, or they're doing WAP all over
again. Which would you care to bet on?
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Thu Jun 13 05:02:10 2002