The Open Mobile Alliance will provide a single forum where Microsoft and partners can work on standards to speed the development of wireless data services—online services delivered to mobile devices over commercial wireless phone networks—which Microsoft sees as an important source of future growth for itself and its partners. The Alliance will speed progress on service standards by unifying the efforts of several formerly separate vendor groups, but will have to solve many difficult technical problems and find a way to resolve longstanding conflicts among its many members.

The new group will have almost 200 members, including Microsoft and all other members of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum, which designed the browsing protocols used in many wireless phones. The group also subsumes the Open Mobile Architecture initiative formed by Nokia to define a standard architecture for mobile services, including device-side and server-side APIs, protocols, and content formats (based on the XHTML Web content standard). The following groups also plan to merge with the Alliance:

• The Location Interoperability Forum, which works on standards for exchanging location information for mobile devices
• The Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) Interoperability Group, which develops standards for exchange of photos, video, and other media among mobile devices
• SyncML, which defines standard protocols for synchronizing data, such as address books, with mobile devices
• Wireless Village, which specifies standards for exchanging user presence information (such as whether a user is actively using her mobile device at the moment) between devices and instant messaging and conferencing systems.

Alliance Could Speed New Services

Merging these groups could speed the development of what Microsoft believes will be the next generation of wireless data services: services that exploit location and presence information and that are designed for "smart" mobile devices with large color screens and local storage. For instance, a traffic service might access a route map stored on the user's mobile device, determine the user's current location, and notify the user of problems on the road ahead. Microsoft hopes that such services will prove more useful and more profitable than the current generation of services.

Initially, however, the Alliance will probably simply continue the efforts of the groups that it combines and promote adoption of newer standards, such as WAP 2.0 and MMS, by carriers and equipment manufacturers. Merging groups into the Alliance will not do anything to end vendor conflicts that hinder these efforts. Microsoft, for instance, could find itself at odds with Open Mobile Architecture members such as Nokia, who favor Java for both device-side and server-side APIs, or with SyncML members, whose protocol Microsoft has never adopted in its mobile device platforms. What the Alliance will provide is a single place where contending vendors can find like-minded partners and vie for the attention of wireless carriers.

The Open Mobile Alliance Web site is www.openmobilealliance.org. For a brief update on Microsoft's wireless data service efforts, see "Verizon Deal Shows Mobile Strategy" on page 18 of the July 2002 Update.