Wholesale Applications Community Drowns in Noise

by Joe Brockmeier - Feb. 16, 2010Comments (2)

First rule of public relations: Don't make an announcement when it's going to be drowned out by competing announcements you can't hope to beat. The Wholesale Applications Community announcement put out yesterday was up against not one, but two mobile announcements guaranteed to steal its thunder: Windows 7 Mobile and the MeeGo announcement from Nokia and Intel.

Setting aside the bad timing, let's look at the actual initiative. What is the Wholesale Applications Community? A major initiative from a gaggle of telecom operators to build an open platform for mobile phone users. It combines 24 operators, including AT&T, NTT, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, and many others, with device manufacturers LG Electronics, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. The group's mission is to create a "wholesale" app ecosystem for deployment across all carriers and devices, rather than the fragmented ecosystem that we have now with apps for various phones and carriers.

With all that weight behind it, how could it possibly fail? The way most industry initiatives fail, by trying to be all things to all people, and being a lukewarm and unfocused offering in the face of platforms like the iPhoneOS and Android. Not to mention moving with all the speed of the average industry initiative while single-vendor offerings steam along without looking back. A vendor-neutral and open platform may be desirable in theory, but in practice these things tend to move far too slowly to be a challenge to platforms driven by a single vendor.

True to form, the WAC announcement says that the alliance will "use both the JIL and OMTP BONDI requirements, evolving these standards into a common standard within the next 12 months. Ultimately, we will collectively work with the W3C for a common standard based on our converged solution..." In 12 months, the iPhone platform picked up tens of thousands of applications. Who knows how many applications the iPhone and Android platforms will have 12 months from now?

Techcrunch's Jason Kincaid called the new group a disaster in the making, saying that the effort is a "pipe dream" from carriers hoping to reclaim some control after being railroaded by Apple.

Maybe this will amount to more than it seems, but the initial announcement and information available today isn't very inspiring.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years covering IT. Formerly the openSUSE Community Manager for Novell, Brockmeier has written for Linux Magazine, Sys Admin, Linux Pro Magazine, IBM developerWorks, Linux.com, CIO.com, Linux Weekly News, ZDNet, and many other publications. You can reach Zonker at jzb@zonker.net or follow him on Twitter.

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by Jolie Robert on Aug. 16, 2010

I agree with "wholesale dropshippers" comment. Mobile is now one basic channel through which businesses can communicate directly and share online services. As he has given a resource of dailytrader.com where you can analyze how many features are now available for mobile phones like cables, cases, tv to mobile connectivity, online sharing softwares, etc.

1 Votes

by David Patterson on Sep. 06, 2010

Yeah Jolie online marketing is getting vast and vast everyday i was very amazed to know the that how online business is growing and their is not only dailytrader but also the other sites where you can analyze product from every angle by sitting at home like ebay.com or wholesalepages.co.uk

0 Votes