Well, I think the idea of worrying about the obstacles wasn't such a bad plan!
By: alea.jacta.est
02 Jul 2003, 01:14 PM EDT
1wavoid,
You fall into the usual Wavoid chasm. The technology is great, therefore it should be possible to sell it.
Loads of great technology is difficult to sell for whatever reason. EMBASSY is one of those technologies. Not only Wave, but EDS, IBM Global, Maximus and Mercer ALL failed to sell EMBASSY. That should tell you something.
Let me give you some of the reasons the full EMBASSY failed to deploy over the last several years:
1. The chip is too expensive up front.
2. It's difficult to get content and service providers, financial institutions and technology suppliers to develop their own products around a new system that is a blueprint. Chickens and eggs come to mind.
3. Wave has limited marketing capital.
4. Wave has an aggressive business model which it was reluctant to relinquish for obvious reasons (which I support).
5. Wave is rightly wedded to the idea of an open architecture. But the people that control the PC industry rely on the proprietary model and an open structure contains many risks for them.
6. There are no sovereign authorities obviously capable of providing mandates across the network. And a mandate of some kind is necessary for an architecture of this kind. The EU's information society project is still in planning and testing. And TCG was the result of Microsoft (after years of reluctance) finally accepting in 2002 that a hardware architecture is necessary.
But Wave pursued a very patient (and research-intensive) strategy in this last area, and pushed over the dominoes that mattered in the end. The open channel was, in my view, the slowest and also the deepest one.
I think this explanation is less valid for Wavexpress, which for reasons known to itself has pursued one disastrous strategy after another. First it was datacasting, then cable, then content aggregation and now, finally, technology licensing. In this case, it might have been best to begin with a bit of humility, rather than to be driven to it. The "own the world" strategy is not the only one available to businesses, and Wave would have benefitted hugely from a revenue stream over the last few years, even if it meant growing a company incrementally and from the ground up. Although doubtless I am being wise after the event.
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