Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
"M-commerce" is coming, says wireless king Alain Rossmann, who already buys books with two clicks on his wireless phone.
Jan 31, 2000 | Sporting a screen about the size of a Post-It, low-powered by any measure and limited to operating within today's narrowband airwaves, the wireless phone wouldn't necessarily be your first choice as a Web-access device. Not unless you were Alain Rossmann, that is. Given his history of founding start-ups -- like digital video firm Radius, video compression pioneer C-Cube Microsystems -- and his chief's seat at early PDA company EO, Rossmann's credentials as a visionary thinker were already well-established by the time he started tinkering with the idea of building a "microbrowser" for phones in early 1995. Thinking out of the box was one thing, but conventional wisdom suggested that using a phone to browse the Web was, well, a little wacky. Still, the guy had just sold EO to AT&T for a tidy little sum. So let him play.
And play he did, while his small company, Unwired Planet, evolved into Phone.com -- now generally recognized as a major player in the boundless space between computing and telecommunications. It's a position the company has earned by developing and promulgating the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), the software layer that enables Web browsing on wireless phones in spite of the limited screen size, spotty connections, thin bandwidth and low processing power. Together with telecom heavyweights Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia -- the holy trinity of the wireless world -- Phone.com helped to form the WAP Forum a little over two years ago. And since then, just about every big name in telecommunications and computing has hurried to get on board. All of which means that nobody wonders anymore about whether the French engineer is off his nut. They just want to know what he's thinking about now.
The WAP club now includes over 150 members, representing some 95 percent of the world market for wireless handsets. That has to be gratifying. But does that mean you've won the standards war? Or just the first battle?
One correction: The club now includes 250 members. It's growing extremely fast. The number you're quoting is based on a snapshot taken back in September or October, which just goes to show how tremendous the momentum really is. There's no doubt in my mind we've won the standards war. When you have that many companies with that much power representing that much of the world market all agreeing on one way of doing things, that way is the way.
There are some people up in Redmond who continue to hold out hope that some permutation of Windows CE will become a contender.
Fine. Let them hang on to that hope. I would say the likelihood of that is very, very, very low. No single company in a carrier-dominated world is going to be able to dictate the standards. The reason 250 companies have lined up behind WAP is because it's a standard that belongs to everyone. Of course, we're center stage, which is a good place to be. It's always good to be the company that invents something everybody else adopts. But what we did was relinquish control so the standard could gain general acceptance. That's the kind of trade-off that businesses are faced with each and every day on the Internet. And making that decision is what propelled us to where we are today.
By extension, I take it you're saying you don't believe Microsoft would make a similar trade-off?
That's not what they do for a living. And there are other factors as well. One of the things that has made WAP so vibrant is that we've targeted the mass-market wireless phone -- a very unlikely device, frankly. Coming from a PC perspective, it looks like an extremely limited device. On the other hand, it's a magical device that over 1 billion people will carry two years from now. It also knows how to do voice -- and there's a lot of work being done to expand the voice capabilities WAP supports. What's more, it's a device that knows where it is -- with the network tracking you as you move around.
But what really makes a wireless phone interesting is that it's much more personal than your PC. It's with you and it's on all the time. It's in your pocket. And this world of very personal, very small devices is one that's foreign to Microsoft. Part of their difficulty is that Windows CD and CE are targeted at devices that are less constrained. And that just goes to show how difficult it is for Microsoft to shed its PC heritage.
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