Mobile Standards and the Tower of Babel
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The Tower of Babel was to be built by a united humanity to reach the heavens. God sowed confusion among the builders by creating different languages because the hearts of men were said to be inherently evil and disobedient. That’s how Wikipedia describes the Tower of Babel.
Creating Mobile Standards has possibly the same challenges as that Tower to reach the heavens. Certainly that was one commentator’s view when the Open Mobile Alliance came together on June 12, 2002 to take on this challenging project. The mission of the Open Mobile Alliance was to facilitate global user adoption of mobile data services by specifying market driven mobile service enablers that ensure service interoperability across devices, geographies, service providers, operators, and networks, while allowing businesses to compete through innovation and differentiation.
Since then there’s been lots of activity. In 2004, the W3C launched its Mobile Web Initiative. However the explosive growth of the Mobile Internet world makes it difficult for large groups of stakeholders to take the time to modify their individual preferences and accept agreed standards. So it is not surprising to see the following from Anders Borg, a keen observer of all things mobile. He asks, “Has OMA lost its mojo?” In his view, when OMA comes out with anything new it’s typically way too late and often completely misdirected, and is rather a reflection of yesterday’s walled garden thinking, that consumers and service providers try to break any way they can.
Agreeing standards even in the stabile (non-mobile) Internet world is proving to be extremely challenging. What hope can there be for the Mobile Internet world? Perhaps we should just learn to live with our Tower of Babel.
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[...] Related: Mobile Standards and the Tower of Babel [...]
December 16th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
[...] Powerful players are pushing to ensure that the Mobile Internet has as much content as the regular Internet world. One objective is that any web page designed for a desktop PC should also be viewable on mobile devices too. This has been dubbed as the One Web Principle. Unfortunately with so much potential ad revenue to be gained in the Mobile world, different players are in general doing their own thing. Developing and getting industry consensus on Mobile Standards is proving to be a veritable Tower of Babel. Given this, it is not surprising that Desktop PC viewable websites are rarely suitable for Mobile devices. [...]