Candid execs enliven
Wireless 2000 show
By Carmen Nobel, PC Week Online
February 29, 2000 2:51 PM ET
NEW ORLEANS -- It was wireless Internet day here at
CTIA's Wireless 2000 show Tuesday. And in keeping
with the industry's preference for "complete solutions,"
the keynote session was composed of representatives
from dot-com companies, phone service companies and
hardware manufacturers.
Sun Microsystems Inc. Chief Operating Officer Ed
Zander used the show to announce new initiatives that
Sun is launching in the wireless arena.
Palm Computing plans to use Sun's iPlanet services
and Star Office portal to give customers wireless
access to corporate applications via their Palm VII
wireless PDAs, Zander said.
Sun also announced a co-branded service with Lucent
Technologies Inc. that is intended to enable mobile
workers to gain access to corporate intranets and
e-mail systems from any mobile or landline phone,
using various technologies from both companies,
including Bell Labs' text-to-speech recognition and
Sun's iPlanet mail and calendar application and Solaris
OS.
The Intuitive Applications Access solution for service
providers will be marketed to wireless carriers.
Zander did not provide a due date, but the
demonstration of the voice browser during his keynote
was glitchy. The computer didn't want to listen and
followed only about half of the commands.
"Well, it's beta," said a Sun employee who was helping
Zander demonstrate the system.
For the rest of his keynote Zander made a point of
touting the importance of bandwidth (as if anyone
doubted it).
"Betting against bandwidth is like betting against
Moore's Law," he said.
Zander also said that users of wireless devices
shouldn't have to worry about what operating systems
run their devices, especially if they were using the
devices primarily for surfing the Internet. Indeed, he took
a direct jab at Compaq Computer Corp. CEO Michael
Capellas, who had shown a Compaq Aero device earlier
in the keynote session.
"When [Capellas] said that what he was showing was a
Windows CE device, I said to myself, who cares?"
Zander said. "I never ask about operating system or
instruction set. ... A [device] should just work. ... I never
had to read an operating manual for my Palm VII."
A Capellas 'fearless forecast'
Capellas, for his part, said the combination of wireless
technology and the Internet will be explosive because
the technology is maturing just as dot-com companies
are really coming into their own.
"The market is taking a deep breath and saying, 'Hey,
guys, it's no longer about PowerPoint slides,'" he said.
"'You have a strategy that says everything we do has to
be Internet-based.' ... The wave of wireless in the
Internet access device is absolutely a megatrend."
(Zander, incidentally, did most of his presentation on
PowerPoint slides.)
Capellas, like Zander, is a fan of voice recognition.
Holding up a Compaq Aero, he said, "Voice activation
will come, and it will be a boon to these kinds of
devices."
Capellas also delivered what is fast becoming a
tradition at his speeches -- a "fearless forecast" of
upcoming trends. Today he predicted that, within 48
months, the average cost of a phone call will go down
by 70 percent, that 60 percent of phone calls will be
wireless, and that within five years there will be 1 billion
Internet access devices in the marketplace.
Bezos: Sky's the limit
Representing the dot-com set was no less than Time
Magazine's Man of the Year, Amazon.com CEO Jeff
Bezos, who was supposed to be the main speaker
today but who spoke instead via satellite because his
wife is about to have a baby. The company just
launched a site specifically for wireless e-commerce.
"It's unbelievable what people will do when you make
them mobile," Bezos said. "There's a different kind of
impulse shopping when you're sitting in a taxi cab and
your friend says, 'You should buy Tom's book,' and you
do it right there. ... Today the revenues from wireless
are minimal, but look far enough into the future and it
will be 100 percent of our revenues."
Bezos said he thought flat-rate service would be
necessary in order to make wireless Internet access
pervasive in the United States. Asked what he thought
of NTT DoCoMo's iMode service, which charges on a
per-packet basis and was discussed at the show
yesterday, Bezos said he didn't like the idea.
"I think that creates too much uncertainty," he said. "It
reminds me of that [Tootsie Pop] commercial with the
owl and the lollipop. How many packets does it take to
buy a book?"
Alain Rossman, chairman and CEO of Phone.com and
the father of the Wireless Access Protocol, also spoke
today. After defending the slow standards process of
WAP (which is known in some circles as "Where Are
the Phones?"), Rossman explained why Phone.com
has purchased three companies in the last 90 days.
"You need to build the map and then you need to fill it,"
he said. Phone.com is also one of the bigger and earlier
companies to adopt an application service provider
model.
U.S. West CEO Sol Trujillo batted cleanup at the
keynote session, playing it Switzerland-safe with
relatively mild comments about the industry. Carriers in
general have tended to play it safe with wireless data
services, investigating many applications in the lab
before actually offering them to the public.
"Wireless, global, Internet, broadband -- it's all part of
the strategy I've been thinking about for a few years," he
said. |
