re: MSFT & the Wireless Data Frontier (Wi-Fi, 3G, Pocket PC)
The software gorilla's research chief talks about wireless networks' influence on his company's business.
>> Microsoft's Wireless Road Ahead
David Orenstein
Business 2.0
December 12, 2001
business2.com
Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research, recently flew down from Seattle to the company's Mountain View, Calif., campus to talk with employees and visitors about current projects. He also encouraged them to think big, saying they should contemplate writing software that would use terabyte disc drives and nearly unlimited bandwidth.
Those advances might be coming to a desktop near you (someday, maybe). But where do wireless devices with limited memory and slow connections fit into Rashid's futuristic vision?
Microsoft's chief researcher sat down with Business 2.0 to talk about Wi-Fi, 3G, and the next-generation Pocket PC.
Compared with the PC, has the wireless Internet proved disappointing?
It depends on your definition of wireless. I think, in some sense, we are actually seeing a lot of wireless use; it's just probably less phone wireless and more local area network wireless. There's been a lot of progress made with Wi-Fi, where the speed is effectively 11 megabits. When you go to 802.11a, we'll start to see 54 megabits. At Sea-Tac Airport, while I was waiting in the security line, I could actually check my mail.
Where else do you use wireless?
My house is wireless. I take my laptop with me anywhere in my house I want to go. I use a wireless mouse to talk to the big-screen TV in my living room. Our whole way of doing business at Microsoft has been dramatically affected by 802.11b networks.
How so?
People always used to talk about videoconferencing at your desk. What has happened is exactly the opposite. You don't have virtual meetings in your office; you go to real meetings and you bring your office with you. The barrier for going to a meeting now is lower. If I'm only interested in part of the meeting, I can still go. I can still keep in touch with everything else that I'm doing.
On the research side, we're looking at using 802.11b to do in-building location-finding. We can keep track of where somebody is and help them find something that they need, such as the nearest printer.
With Pocket PC 2002, Microsoft has started to merge cell phones and handheld computers. What are we going to see in Pocket PC 2004 or 2006?
Your Pocket PC should be integrated with other devices. Microsoft Research is working on technologies to let you move seamlessly from the environment you have with your laptop or desktop or tablet PC to the environment you may have with your Pocket PC or mobile phone. You want to tie all those information sources together, make notifications work across all of them, and be able to adapt information to each device.
What's the killer app that will make people want to pay for 3G?
People think that because the cost of the network is very high, the value of the application has to be equally high. It's a chicken and the egg problem. Go back and look at spreadsheets and word processors. These were really important applications, but at the same time, there were tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of other uses for PCs. You need to take that philosophy to the wireless space. It is not going to be just one thing. As we get real 3G networks deployed, we're going to find a lot of uses for them too. <<
- Eric - |
