For you benighted souls who are not yet subscribed to Wireless
Watch, this week's Viewpoint is (IMHO) especially interesting:
http://www.japaninc.net/newsletters/index.html?list=ww
If there's any Big Idea here, it's Victor Pikula's thesis -- a
cultural-exceptionalist argument to the effect that it was
corporate culture, not consumer culture, that got Japan where
it is today in wireless. I use "corporate culture" here not in the
U.S. sense of "the culture of a specific corporation," but
in the sense of what Victor called "industrial organization"
in his dissertation -- i.e., the culture of inter-corporate relations,
which still has its very distinctive Japanese pattern
even in these days of nervously edging toward "guro-ba-ru
suta-nda-do."
M-services -- whatever they turn out to be in the long run --
looks to Daniel to be an attempt to take on a more Japanese
approach toward defining and fielding wireless innovations.
Me? I just see "yet another reactively-formed Western
consortium", an old story in high tech that hasn't played out
well in the past. At least in this case, it's not a reaction to a
near-takeover of a market by Japanese exporters, however.
Not yet, anyway.
Consider this: Moore's Law plus the perennial Japanese
edge in consumer electronics means that the winners
in the mobile phone market-dominance race here in
Japan (not Fujitsu, we know that much) will be able to
cram in compatibility with ANY attempt at a standard
overseas, while manufacturers in the West will be struggle
to be compatible with only a few at most, at higher unit
cost.
If M-services begins to show signs of the kind of
Eurocracy that bedeviled OSI networking standards,
Japanese handset manufacturers will be well-positioned
to sweep up all the chips, just by agreeing on what
reasonable subsets and extensions to support. The
M-services wonks will then have as much control
over the definition of M-services as the SGML
committee folk had over HTML; crying "foul!" and
"heresy!" in the wilderness, while the de facto
standards-setters apologize abjectly -- all the way
to the bank.
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Mon Jun 25 06:56:12 2001