Everyone wants to rule the wireless kingdom.
Big-name technology makers, including Qualcomm, Motorola, Sun Microsystems, Nokia, Microsoft--and even chip giant Intel--are looking to become to wireless devices what Windows is to the PC: a universal standard for software developers.
With projections of a multibillion-dollar future, many technology companies are vying to establish a de facto standard for wireless software, creating a new revenue source even if sales of cell phone handsets--the most commonly used wireless devices--slip.
In the 1980s, Microsoft and Intel established dominance in the personal computer market with the Windows operating system and Intel's line of processors. The winner in the wireless standards battle, analysts say, could wind up as the next "Wintel."
"There's a battleground out there. The stakes are big," said Samuel May, a wireless analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. "The computer industry settled on one operating system. The mobile phone (market) is bigger than the computer (market)."
Indeed, worldwide sales of mobile phones have dwarfed PC sales in recent years. But many analysts and company executives are now worried that handset sales are slowing, prompting research and development into entire software architectures suitable for mobile phones or whatever new wireless devices come to the fore.
Qualcomm is the latest company to jump into the fray. The company has announced a new wireless Internet and software development technology, called BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless), aimed at allowing developers to create software applications for any wireless phone. The ambitious plan has Qualcomm poised to generate new revenue from consumers who could download and install software onto their mobile phones, in much the same way customers do now with PCs and handheld computers such as Palm and Handspring's Visor.
Qualcomm's BREW is the most recent entry in what's become an alphabet soup of similar standards efforts aimed at dominating the fractured wireless industry.
At least three major wireless transmission technologies--GSM (Global System for Mobile communications), CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access), which Qualcomm developed and licenses, and TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access)--dominate the worldwide market. At the same time, dozens of carriers and handset makers require wireless software and mobile Internet developers to tweak their applications for different phones and carriers. Analysts say this is partly to blame for the slow adoption of wireless Internet services in the United States and their higher cost here than in other areas of the globe.
