By editorial@silicon.com, 18 June 2001 18:00
COMMENT There was a time when barely a week went by without this column mentioning the rise of the mobile internet. That's changed as the subject has become less high profile. Blame the failings of WAP. Blame late delivery of upgraded GSM networks for data and multimedia purposes. Or blame our short attention span. In the meantime, some players have been slowly getting on with things. And two of the largest in the world - in any industry - today announced some of the fruits of their labours. Branded Vodafone OfficeLive, a service to bring Microsoft Office applications - starting with Outlook - to corporate customers should be available by the end of July. The announcement is important for several reasons. For one thing, Vodafone is betting it can make something like a quarter of its revenue from data services just three years from now. Providing a service that allows real time connectivity with corporate servers - so that the bytes keep flowing - will go some way to doing that, certainly in comparison to merely providing a high-speed connection using those 2.5G and 3G standards we know as GPRS and UMTS. Microsoft, of course, will want other operators and individual enterprises to go down the route of using versions of its Mobile Information 2001 Server software. It admits mobility is central to its .NET vision, and is willing to entertain the thought of end users with devices - gasp! - not based on in its Windows software. It knows winning the back end battle will be ample compensation (although it is perhaps surprising its partner Ericsson - a major supplier of Vodafone's - was nowhere to be seen in this latest deal). And finally, there is always the fact that whatever the limitations of this latest offering (an understandable bias towards Exchange being one of them), as one analyst pointed out, it is clearly always significant when majors of this size start co-operating. So keep an eye out. The mobile internet - or intranet even, here - is back. Like it ever went away.
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