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A Wireless Alliance Forms
MikeD83 writes "A wireless alliance has formed between the likes of Nokia, Microsoft, Intel, Walt Disney Co., and almost 200 other companies. Their mission is to develop an open standard for how wireless phones can be used on any network." Whoo-hoo! DRM for cell phones! The group's website has some more information.
Wow, this is good news. If you love monopolistic, predatory, anti-consumers' rights, pablum spewing consortiums, that is.
more and more componies are banding together nowadays, is this good or bad? maybe they can enact positive change
When the supporters of the Open Mobile Architecture initiative and the WAP Forum consolidated their efforts, a foundation for the new organization was formed - the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA).
HAHAHAHAHA. 802.11 baby!
Why the dig? Because crap like DRM is what typically happens when big corps. get together under an "open" standard for a particular technology - they get together to figure out how to "leverage" (read: screw) customers into a particular standard that then becomes impossible to escape. Naturally, this isn't always the case, but doesn't it ever-increasingly feel like it?
;)
It was a cheap shot, but remember, this IS slashdot.
The Free desktop that Just Works
The article in question says absolutely nothing about Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. True enough that Disney's involvement may "poison the well" (anybody notice the fallacy in Michael's thinking?) but it's not explicitly stated from the outset. Nor, for that matter, are each company's involvements in said conglomerate.
At any rate, I'd still like to see more "open" cooperation such as these two efforts by major bicycle manufacturers, but the fact that the standard is open is hopeful, at the very least.
See, things really can work well when everybody tries to get along.
1) As has been previously stated (and will be again ad nauseum) some of the major players in this consortium have a horrible track record of user's rights. You can be sure the ulterior motive of this group has to do with profits than with end-user convenience. Technically, sure, that is the purpose of business (big or otherwise) but I don't remember anyhing in the rules the says they can't do things for the greater good...
2) Certain parties who shall remain nameless (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) have long had a problem with "maintaining standards." Maybe being part of the defining committee will go some ways towards alleviating the Not-Invented-Here Syndrome, but ultimately I think that any mythical "standards" produced from this will invariably produce a dozen variants of the original. Anyone who's used IE's interpretation of HTML knows this...
Essentially, I suppose I'm saying that when this many 800lb. gorillas get into a room together, the only thing that came come out of it is a more worries for us bananas^H^H^H^H^H^H^H customers.
This stuff is ancient history really, if you look at things like internet protocols and RFCs, the documents that suggest exactly how to solve this sort of problem.
The problems happen when a vendor or group of vendors try to cram standards down the throats of the users.
Anyone else here remember when your typical office email package didn't speak RFC822 and you couldn't mail anyone outside your network?
Eventually, real standards always develop. Doing it early just saves everyone a lot of money and bother.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
These people have no idea what they're doing. Eight years ago they didn't see SMS coming. Four years ago, awash with cash, they saw the web, and got together in a big committee and decided that the future was a cut-down version of that, so they formed another big committee and invented WAP, which was a dismal failure. Two years ago they spent all their money on 3G licenses and infrastructure, thus making the problem of finding a killer app somewhat urgent. But they still have no idea. The best thing they can think of is video on demand, but who is going to pay for porn on a tiny phone screen? So here they are again, with another big committee trying to invent the next big thing.
I don't know what the next big thing for mobiles is, but I do know that it's not going to be invented by this, or any other, big committee. It is safe to ignore anything these people do.
Whoo-hoo! DRM for cell phones
You might be joking, but the horror is that DRM actually work well with mobile phone.
I've been working with people bidding projects for mobile computing. Mobile business is an area where you find eveyrthing proprietary.
First you must sign NDA to be allowed to program a GSM sim, then when you've done with the sim you must sign a partnership(aka pay them big bucks of money) agreement with telcos and mobile makers so that they'd ever consider recognize the sim cards you made. Otherwise they can always deny your sim from accessing their network. The problem is that when you asked one Telco/mobile maker to sign an agreement with you, they'll probably include in the agreement forbid you from signing a similar agreement with their competitors. There goes the market penetration.
That's why you don't see much special purpose sim card around. Unlike PC market, the business of mobile markets are controlled by the telcos and mobile makers.
DRM would probably not work in PC market, but it would succeed in such a business environment where the business are controlled by several big corps.
From the FAQ:
---
Q: Which key enabling technologies are the priorities in the Open Mobile Alliance?
A: The companies involved in the alliance will decide the key enabling technologies jointly. However, it is evident that Multimedia Messaging (MMS), Java and WAP 2.0/XHTML browsing are among the most relevant ones. Some other technologies driving the mobile services market include service enablers such as Digital Rights Management (DRM), authentication, location and presence identification and device management.
---
Being a mobile application developer for several years I do feel that WAP has been a complete failure due to that it is just re-inventing the 'web' wheel and however it lacks of functionality, flexibility and extensibility (which are indeed some of the success factors of the web). Yes may be it is god damn hard to squeeze any more stuff into the phone without compromise. But take a look at the evolution of PDA and the latest Japanese phones in action. What the hell's going on in those mobile phone vendors' R&D? All the stuff that they claim to be available on the 3G phone 'in future' (e.g. music/movie/video-conf) are in fact old stuff and should be available NOW. We already have:
lower power XXXMHz CPU(strongArm/Crusoe/whatever) + XXMB of RAM + wireless LAN/GPRS/Bluetooth connectivity + C/Java/etc = unlimited imagination for applications
A wireless data enabled PDA can now and will continue to surpass a phone with handicapped PDA functions 'squeezed' in. On the PDA we have common, standardized, (sort of) open platform that seamlessly inherit all the existing internet technology and its even ready for steering the technology ahead, as opposed to the mobile phone industry where it is full of proprietary hardware/interfaces and they just try to keep following the internet trend but can never catch up. (You might argue that I'm comparing apple to orange, but it is the vendor of orange who's trying to make it more apple-like.)
J2ME may have some hope but it depends on how much phone capability can actually be exploited through the JVM. I want more than the just ability to print some "Hello World" or draw several types of GUI widgets. I want the ability to program the phone functions(such as the voice codec, the built-in modem, the phone's firmware, the external interface, etc...). These may be in conflict with the philosophy of Java. But we developers do need this kind of extensibility/programmability do more.
MMS is just too little too late. And is being exploited by mobile service providers say in Hong Kong as gimmick to make money. There might be some kids willing to pay for downloading some fancy cartoon character animations but this is far from my expectation for what can be done with 'multimedia'.
The big vendors in the mobile industry keep creating this kind of alliances trying to take/stay in control of the industry advancement but so far hadn't created anything worthwhile. They decided that they don't need to release too much capability/control to the developer/consumer and that's why we can't do much with WAP other than just browsing some down-scaled text content. Now they see and feel the failure and are crazy coming up solutions to save the industry. I hope that they can actually work out a nice standard with full implementation everywhere.
While the notion of an ad-hoc public network created by people running wireless networking devices in their homes and on their mobiles I'll admit is quite compelling, it does have some major problems. They are, essentially, distance and density. The cross large distances would require a huge amount of power, such that it's no longer reasonable for a guy living in the suburbs to be providing the connectivity for free, paying his own electricity bill. And because none of these links are going to be extremely high bandwidth (compared to fiber), to get current internet-like performance you're going to need a massive amount of independent connections especially across the large gaps. The biggest obstacle to this People's Internet are the Oceans. After that comes places like Wyoming, where anything as developed as a -gas station- is 60 miles apart.
Which is a shame, because I'd love for it to happen.
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