If you think about it, today's wireless Internet market bears a direct resemblance to the fledgling personal computer market of 20 years ago. Lots of new machines, many quite different, and many hard to use. The technology was confusing -- all those acronyms! With few of the computers or add-on devices working well together. But that didn't stop many people from becoming addicted to these new machines -- mainly because computers held so much promise of new things we could do in our private and professional lives.
That's how the mobile market feels -- right down to the initial things we're doing with wireless devices. In the U.S., it's mostly rudimentary e-mail; overseas, it's playing games. Yes, it seems so familiar, but examined more closely, it's actually quite different this time around, especially for business.
We're so accustomed to using today's sophisticated applications on our PCs at home and at work that we forget it took more than a decade for corporate America to embrace these toys. Then another decade passed before the technology truly matured enough to support these applications. Yet businesses are already experimenting with wireless applications as part of their day-to-day operations.
And that's the one huge difference: The wireless Internet won't take 20 years to reach a similar state of evolution. Perhaps not even five or 10 years (Some would put it at 20 months.). Whatever it will be, businesses today cannot hold off a few years while this novelty stabilises. They need to embrace wireless or be left behind (remember the Web?).
"That's the good news and the bad news," says Craig Mathias, an analyst with the mobile technology firm FarPoint Consulting. "Wireless technology is real, and it works. But it's continually evolving."
Some businesses aren't letting a moving target stop them. They're taking a natural first step by building or buying simple applications for their sales forces. The field reps at exercise equipment manufacturer Cybex International use a wireless application from PeopleSoft that runs on Sprint PCS cell phones. Thus, a rep meeting with a health-club customer can check an order status wirelessly. If the customer has a question, says Brian Lyman, manager of e-commerce at Cybex, "The sales rep connects and answers it -- and looks smarter without calling the office."
Nonetheless, such applications are rare today. The wireless transmission networks simply need time to develop in order to support more substantive business applications. But as those networks are rapidly upgraded over the next few years, the wireless Internet will become an important part of most businesses.
