Enterprise Software Anchors Wireless Plan

The recent beta release of Outlook Mobile Manager marks the public debut of a set of Microsoft products that enable companies to make data and applications available through wireless devices such as cellular phones, pagers, and handheld computers. These products—the Outlook Mobile Manager notification add-in to Outlook, the Outlook Mobile Access front end for Exchange, and the Mobile Information Server wireless application server—will be central to Microsoft’s broader plan to offer a software platform for implementing wireless data services. They could also open up intriguing business opportunities for the company’s partners.

Today’s Wireless Data Services

The most popular mobile device, by several orders of magnitude, is the cellular phone, which by some estimates could have 1 billion users in 2003. The dominant wireless data service for phones today is simple: sending short text messages between phones over the Short Message Service (SMS). Text messaging is attractive because it consumes less expensive airtime than voice for a given message, combines immediate delivery (when the recipient’s phone is on) with e-mail-like store-and-forward capabilities (when the phone is off), and can be used in situations where users cannot talk (classrooms for teens, meetings for their elders). In Europe, SMS messages already outnumber voice calls ten to one.