Wireless Vendors Get Focal Point

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: