“To be sure, there is a capitalistic, not an altruistic, element behind all the interest in the standards-setting. “Those who favor interoperable standards are those who sell hardware — or those who can conceive of Web-based services reaching ever-broader customer sets because their connections are more reliable, or exist at all,” Rita Gunther McGrath, an associate professor at Columbia Business School at Columbia University in New York, told Wireless World.
Not everyone in the industry, however, wants or accepts the standards that are being promoted, she observed. “Resistance, such as it is, comes from those who would like to embed their intellectual property in a part of the platform in some way, and thus benefit from the growth of WiMax-enabled networks,” said McGrath, who is also co-author of “MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth.”
“So you’ll see these folks holding out for specifications that favor their technologies in some way.”
The “holy grail” for these companies would be to have their technology, whatever it may be, become as universal in the WiMax platform as Qualcomm’s technology is in mobile-phone CDMA devices. The idea for companies would be to “be able to collect transactional revenue from the IP held there,” said McGrath.
This is what McGrath laconically labels the “enduring dilemma” of new technology “ecosystems.”
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