Subject: Re: Value of smart cards. Re: Signing what you don't understand

From: "Anders Rundgren" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 11:39:31 +0200

Peter,
regarding WAP I think it was "invented" to cope with the extremely
low bandwith and high latency available in GSM.  Unfortuntely such bandwidth
and latency is useless anyway.  And prices on circuit-switched GSM are
much too high to make WAP interesting except for a few proffesionals.
And time has showed that only when technology reaches the masses it
becomes really interesting.  So we will have to wait a while to get
GPRS/UMTS, Bluettooth, Palm-like displays and JVMs etc.
And to get phones that update themselves whenever there is
a new OS-version.  The mobile phone makers are already facing
considerable "PC-misery" with incompatibility between WAP-browsers,
upgrading hassles and unreliable operation.  Although it is
nice with standards I still believe that it is too hard to implement
many standards so the best is really that just 2-3 mobile OS survives.
This is awkward for mobile phones makers who believe(d) that they
should "differentiate" with software.  I don't think that strategy scales
very well as it will lock the market to certain operators and content
providers.  Essentially they can only differentiate on purely exernal stuff
such as display quality, battery capacity, packaging, chicness, pricing
and only to a minor extent on local software features. 

Anders

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Lipp <[email-masked]>
To: Anders Rundgren <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked] <[email-masked]>
Date: Thursday, July 20, 2000 09:47
Subject: AW: Value of smart cards. Re: Signing what you don't understand

> as you say.  But the SIM/WIM card will. Actually 300 million
> *existing* customers can't be wrong!
While the pure number of customers does not prove anything (they would have
used that technology without any card on it) it definitely could provide a
solid basis for deployment. Pity is that the vendors decide to reinvent the
world with all the WAP-versions of whatever already had been defined... Our
experience with one of the vendors in an EU-project showed lack of interest
in implementing relevant standards upcoming in the EU, as long as they don't
start with WA(P).

Peter