Herschel Shosteck Associates Ltd. has discussed our view of the prognosis for Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) in other e-mail briefings and in our white paper. We are often asked whether, given our appraisal of WAP, we think WAP will ever succeed.
The answer is, surprisingly, “perhaps.” WAP will be deployed or supported by many carriers, infrastructure manufacturers and terminal manufacturers.
Many are supporting WAP but not relying on it-meaning that their technology proposals will work with WAP devices on the network, but will also work without WAP devices. Should WAP continue to deliver only very limited content to very limited devices (namely, smart phones), we see no reason to alter our stated position on WAP.
On the other hand, if the WAP Forum can expand WAP to serve more capable devices (such as PDAs and handheld PCs), in a fashion that brings meaningful value to the end users of those devices, it might exceed our expectations. This could occur in a future release of WAP.
There are two barriers to this:
1) The WAP Forum has been locked into a strategy of developing a low-level protocol specifically to serve smart phones. As long as the WAP Forum views the cellular/PCS phone market as a singular entity deserving of its own protocol, despite the clearly emerging spectrum of wireless appliances, it will fail to understand the overall competitive marketplace.
2) Numerous third parties have emerged with proprietary protocols or clever work-arounds to deliver content to mobile devices. This has occurred because WAP is (a) too limiting, and (b) too slow to reach the market. An example is 3Com’s (Palm Computing) “web clipping” service, which will enable fairly rich content and e-commerce on PalmPilots. Even WAP supporters, such as IBM, Ericsson, and Fujitsu Software Corp., have developed methods to deliver WAP-like content to a variety of devices without relying on WAP.
The WAP Forum has taken far too long to reach the market. It must begin developing and releasing standards at “Internet speed,” not traditional telecom speeds, if it is to compete with protocols from the computing industry.
In any case, after WAP is finally deployed in late 1999 and 2000, it may be retained by network operators for years. If they have the resources, network operators can keep WAP capability in their network as a fallback.
There is the possibility that even in the worst case, WAP will be retained as a free service to smart phone customers-carrying limited content and messages from network operators. But without expanding its value to end users, WAP will not generate meaningful revenue for anyone.
Jane Zweig
Executive Vice President
Herschel Shosteck Associates Ltd.
United States
