| About InfoWorld : Advertise : Subscribe : Contact Us : Awards : Events : Store |
 |
||||
|
||||
 |
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
||||
|
|
|
||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 COLUMN
WAP: The technology everyone loves to hate For my inaugural column, I'm going to lay out what is increasingly becoming a contrarian view: Rumors of WAP's demise are greatly exaggerated. For better or worse, WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) will become the protocol that wouldn't die -- at least not without a fight.
Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo to name a few -- as well as giants in banking, retail, and travel who are developing their mobile e-sites, including Amazon and Schwab -- all are settling on WAP. Microsoft, who came a bit late to the game, gave its grudging approval recently by redoing its cell phone browser for WAP. Once WAP is so well seeded how easily, can it be uprooted? The answer is, not very easily. This is not to say that WAP is a great solution for accessing the Internet over a cell phone, or that companies looking to implement a wireless strategy internally don't have some serious concerns. By the way, companies with a consumer play are far less concerned because they need to be on every device that moves no matter what the protocol. It's true, as consumer sites get more robust the demand for something better than text, which is all that WAP in its current version can render, will increase. But G3 phones will solve that problem and my bet is whatever the technology is to deliver voice and video on a cell phone they'll still call it WAP. In other words: WAP is dead, long live WAP. That leaves the business-to-business side, where the equation is different and more difficult to solve. Most IT execs are still on the fence, whereas a very few early adopters have settled on proprietary technologies; one is women's accessory company NineWest, which has a non-WAP client/server solution for its field reps and buyers deployed onto older Nokia 9000 cell phones. Developed by Finnish company Celesta, it creates smart forms using SMS (Short Message Service) rather than going through an ISP. I'm told the solution makes the company a ton of money by alerting headquarters in real time, rather than through weekly batch files, when a store carrying its line needs to be restocked. Most of the fence-sitters are looking for a write once, manage once solution that works across the enterprise on all devices. They are dissatisfied with how WAP is implemented -- a friend of mine at Shell says he doesn't want an alternate WAP universe. And there are those who just want to hear the truth. I'm thinking of the executive at a tier-one automotive supplier who asked if I have someone who can write a white paper laying out an explanation of WAP and the alternatives. "Should I go with WAP or J2ME [Java 2 Micro Edition], a mobile ASP [application service provider], or maybe I need a Citrix terminal solution," he wonders. The Shell exec, who doesn't quite like WAP, wants to be able to use the same company form on a desktop, a notebook or a cell phone without rewriting anything. But WAP's WML (Wireless Markup Language) can't be read on an HTML browser, and vice versa. And he also doesn't want to do what he calls "WAP gateway voodoo" to make it all work. Sun's J2ME, which allows a small application to be on the phone so it can be used even when disconnected, appears to be a good solution -- at least it did at JavaOne a couple of weeks ago. However, many ISVs tell you it's too small and lacks too many of the Java Standard Edition components needed to create useable applications. In Sun's defense, Motorola showed off applications such as expense reports, e-mail, and calendaring on an Motorola iDEN cell phone running J2ME; at least that's what they told me was inside. The problem is the solutions being offered to enterprise-level companies are never quite standard or easily interoperable. I don't know what they teach at business schools or Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for that matter, about the benefits of standardization. But the truth is the only way most mobile industry players, marketeers, and engineers seem to know how to differentiate in order to compete is by creating proprietary technology, and the customer be damned. For example, is a mobile computing platform the same as mobile portal technology? Are either of those the same as a wireless Internet platform? Depends on whom you talk to. And the problem is, there's someone new to talk to almost every day of the week. In the past week all three (what should we call them, enterprise mobile solutions?) listed above have been announced, from @hand, Nortel, and Tantau. They all promise to use industry standard technology, except for that little tweak in the middleware somewhere that makes them unique. And just when we were getting used to the idea of being able to conduct business on a cell phone one way or the other, OracleMobile announced its ask@oraclemobile solution, which totally ignores cell phones and promises to satisfy all of your mobile Internet business needs over a pager. Go figure. What will it take to get you off the fence and deploy wireless? E-mail me at ephraim_schwartz@infoworld.com. Ephraim Schwartz is an InfoWorld editor at large. MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
SPONSORED LINKS
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
