New Venture to Meet High Hurdles: Microsoft and Qualcomm's wireless data company faces opposition

Microsoft and Qualcomm have promised that their new joint venture, Wireless Knowledge, a company designed to offer Internet access to mobile users, will be technology-agnostic. That promise has raised doubts and concerns from some in the wireless industry.

Owned equally by Qualcomm and Microsoft and located in San Diego, the new company intends to allow wireless carriers linked to the Wireless Knowledge operations center to offer access to the Internet or corporate intranets regardless of the technology the carrier employs or the device the customer uses.

"Popularizing wireless data means supporting all wireless standards," said Steve Ballmer, president of Microsoft.

User devices such as laptops palm products and wireless phones, must be equipped with a browser or microbrowser. Microsoft recently announced its intention to develop a microbrowser.

Wireless Knowledge currently has formed strategic partnerships with nine carriers that plan to offer the service, including AirTouch and AT&T Wireless. Those carriers say they are interested in services that can help deliver wireless data to the market.

However, even with such strong support from the operator community, Microsoft may hit a brick wall. Many wireless carriers, along with Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia, which supply more than 70% of the world's handsets, are allied with the Wireless Application Protocol Forum-as is Qualcomm. The WAP Forum has essentially developed the same service as the one Wireless Knowledge plans, including a microbrowser, server and extensible markup language-all based on open standards.

"It's surprising that as much as [Microsoft] knows about WAP they would try a parallel approach to do the same thing," said Skip Bryan, director of technology marketing for Ericsson.

WAP has experienced broad support from operators, manufacturers and application developers.

"The de facto world standard is WAP," said Bo Pyskir, vice president and director of marketing for Motorola's Internet networking group.

Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola already have committed to building WAP-based microbrowsers in their products. "We would not likely be able to put two browsers on a phone in the near term if at all in the long term," Bryan said.

A WAP browser requires a WAP server that delivers information originally Internet-formatted for devices with smaller screens and less power.

The demonstration at the press conference introducing Wireless Knowledge featured AT&T's Pocketnet service, which uses a cellular digital packet data phone powered by Unwired Planet's microbrowser. Information was delivered to that handset via Unwired Planet's Up.Link server, according to analysts briefed on the new company.

WAP said it has talked with Microsoft in the past about participation in the forum. "Microsoft would be welcome into WAP," said Ben Linder, vice president of marketing for Unwired Planet.

One difference between the existing WAP products and the initial Wireless Knowledge offering is that at first, Wireless Knowledge will interoperate only with Microsoft servers and software.

Analysts have differing opinions on how open the Wireless Knowledge offering ultimately will be. "Wireless Knowledge is a separate company-they do want to grow," said Barney Dewey, consultant for the Andrew Seybold Group.

But Ray Jodin, senior analyst for Cahners In-Stat Group, doesn't believe that Wireless Knowledge will be technology-agnostic. He expects that, considering Microsoft's history of entering new markets, the company likely will not make it easy to integrate with other products. "They want to dominate and drive everyone else to the ground," he said. "Whether it's Netscape or Unwired Planet, Microsoft does want to dominate."

Ericsson's Bryan warned even operators to watch their market space. "They could compete with the operator's business," he said.