I to must look closer at OPWV and the market it is in.
What I can tell you is OPWV is dominating this field. Nokia is not making any headway ((1) I hear their development kits are just atrocious, (2) I hear the browser is not top notch, and (3) Motorola, et al, do not want to incorporate a competitors browser in their phones), and OPWV (although working in an opens standards committee for much of what it does) is the company charged with creating the standard for the rest of the committees to give a thumbs up to. It does seem the committee says we need this and goes, OPWV, why don't you guys figure out how to do this and get back to us. They don't seem to say the same to Nokia in regard to this technology.
I have a sense that there is a gorilla game afoot here, and if so, OPWV is clearly it. However, I still need to look further. Certainly software is being designed to run on top of OPWV's browser. Certainly OPWV's gateways on the carrier's servers are as stuck on the server as is any other server software enabling product. Certainly the industry needs a common platform to enable services like messaging to go cross standard (ie, CDMA, TDMA, GSM, UTMS, CDMA2000, et al., all these different technologies need to be able to cross communicate for things like SMS).
It was news to me that I could call any phone, no matter the technology, but that I couldn't submit an SMS message to just any phone, because the underlying wireless technology platform gets in the way. This is something else that a common standard aids.
What I do like is the coming of 2.5G. It seems to me that 2.5G can deliver these killer cellular phone applications. Not the streaming media type stuff which I think is way overblown anyway, even at broadband speed on a wired account. But the practical, everyday, can't live without stuff that makes owning and using a cellular phone something like the purchase of a new limb.
OPWV has dominant marketshare in regard, 55-60%, and probably growing, it gets a flat fee per each new activated subscriber (something like $5-$10 per), gets paid for its gateway server software, and for its value added features that run on top of it.
In addition, and this is from about 6 months ago, so I don't have a link to an article, but there were more 3rd party software vendors, by far, writing for the WAP protocol than for say the PALM OS, by a wide margin. Whether or not this adds up to a hill of beans I don't know, but there at least was a lot of excitement in regard at least as numbers are concerned.
I'll see if I can dig deeper into switching costs, etc. But as Don Listwin, CEO has stated, Cisco was based upon open protocols, but still sold proprietary products. I believe OPWV's model is aimed at doing the same. Don't know if the result will be the same.
Tinker
P.S. Has anyone looked at Liberate? I did last night, and here, more than anywhere else, I think a new major OS may be developing, even more so than with BEAS whom I now have concerns about (Charles Schwab, as an example employs both BEAS and IBM web servers in the same company, and marketshare is now about equal for both, not something one would expect in a developing gorilla market). As for example, Comcast utilizes Liberate to centralize its entire cable operations. Gee, another report. But looking strongly in that direction should the price prove right. MSFT, apparently, has won, one such contract, in Portugal. Liberate is dominating the rest of the world.
iTV is still in the chasm, but it is showing signs of hitting the bowling alley if you read the news. |
