I have seen a lot of different people bash WAP over the past two days.
However, I am a firm believer that WAP will become what IP is to us today.
How nice to have firm belief-systems. What I write here are only my personal
opinions.
I posted Rohit's tour of the tangle when I was at Nokia Research last year.
As Phil pointed out in "The Mystery of the Missing Block Diagram", the WAP
gateway is imagined to be playing the cheery ringing tones of the Las Vegas
Polka. The urge to own the last mile seems beyond rational examination.
Having written XPG/1, and much of XPG/4.2, I experience the sensation of
amazement, even wonder, that a company, or a handful of companies, who have
a staggering installed base -- are disinterested in programatic APIs as a
competitive weapon, and instead position themselves in an unnecessary food
fight with the datagram industry -- the "wireless vs wireline" styling that
leaks out of market leach fields. Personally I'd trade the "last mile" for
the execution platform in a single clock cycle, but this may simply reflect
my X v MS (IBM, AT&T, resp.) experience as milage clearly varries.
A handset is one "M" short of being a 3M device. Needless interposition on
the service model makes it unnecessarily difficult to integrate. I agree
with Phil, the best set of bits to pour onto a 2M device (Symbian, Palm, ...)
is open-generica bits, not closed-(src/svc) bits. The core problem after all
is to make the device useful, to expand the service model, not to maximize
tolls for voice plus trivial digital dorkage.
Since the XXX crowd has managed to lead telephony (and some data) service
model development, I'll re-examine my beliefs when I see the XXX techies
start to run with WAP. I believe in their crystal balls ;-)
Eric