The article (only excerpted below) ends optimistically, but not very.
The bigger questions is the extent to which SCKT soared to 50 because of the irrationality of the period, or because it's a pump with more hype than substance. It certainly seems to have real and admired products, so this is no scam -- but it also remains a really tiny company in a marginal market and doesn't make money.
- Charles
oreillynet.com
A discussion today on O'Reilly's editors list considered why Bluetooth has failed to take root year after year. I agreed with the camp that thought it was largely a failure of marketing (specifically, trying to market itself against 802.11b), and also that there has been a sort of chicken-and-egg problem, where Bluetooth in one gadget doesn't get you much; its power shows when it gets into all your gadgets. This is pretty different from 802.11b, where if you shell out for a wireless PC card, you're admitted to a glorious world of wireless networks in offices, conventions, airports and -- according to Cory Doctorow -- enough insecure and community-spirited wireless networks to give seamless coverage in a cab riding through Manhattan.
But I'm an optimist, so I visited the Bluetooth Developers Conference at Moscone in San Francisco on Wednesday. Attendance was respectable; not as mobbed as last December's show in San Jose, but a whole lot more energy than the ghost town I walked into at the Annual Linux Showcase in Oakland last month. It was a lot like last year's show, right down to the demos of cool projects that one could be pretty sure aren't going to show up anytime soon: a Bluetooh-enabled pen that is also a camera (!), thumb-sized Bluetooth radios that plug into the USB port. And three times at three different booths, I saw the same demo: using a Bluetooth connection between a laptop and a mobile phone to use the phone as a modem that connects the laptop to the Internet. At 14 Kbps. Pretty unimpressive, and only slightly less so when you imagine it happening at GPRS speeds -- 40 Kbps realistically. Hardly a killer app to demo at shows |
