Low power Wi-Fi fan Ozmo loads up another $10m

I sense a growing battle for control of competing wireless standards.

This is looking increasingly like a repeat of the VHS vs Betamax kind of battle for control of the underlying technology, in this case wireless, forcing other companies to then finally licence from the winning company. Then the winning company (has the hope of) earning big money from years of licensing agreements with hundreds of manufacturers selling in total billions of products. So I can see why investors would want to gamble on this company, as they are likely to earn their money back and then they have the hope of winning a big piece of control over the market.

As usual what this is showing is at the core, its a battle for control, in this case control over the winning standard and the reason for winning control is to then be able to exploit everyone else who then has to fall in line, to licensing to use the increasing de facto standard, if they wish to earn a living from that growing market place. Its another battle for control, and the winner gets to exploit the licensing companies.

The problem is with wireless standards whilst there is a lot of overlap, there are also lots of different features as well and its these differences that I think are going to limit the chances of an overall winner ever emerging.

(If anything Wi-Fi Direct sounds a lot like Zigbee).

So as programmers, it looks like we are going to be stuck with a never ending interoperability battle for years to come. :(

Some of the main players in this battleground are Bluetooth, Zigbee, RFID, plus lets not forget the late entry from Wireless USB and now we also have Wi-Fi Direct. But even that list is no where near complete. This wireless battleground is an utter nightmare for programmers. For example, for anyone with a strong constitution (and a bottle of brandy to hand!) try daring to look at this bloody scary battleground list of "standards"...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ad-hoc_routing_protocols

Yes there are some applications where wireless is very useful, like a laptop to a router etc. but I can't help wanting to question the logic of the gold rush towards turning everything wireless, not least with the problem of the ever increasingly congested wireless bandwidth that will create, plus the problem of the increased power usage (and increased power wastage, which when multiplied by a billion users we get a lot more power wasted for often little reason) and then we have addition hassle of things like having to charge wireless devices, something I never have to think about with my trusty old wired PC keyboard. Plus then of course wireless also brings with it additional security problems and issues that wired solutions don't suffer from.

It seems logic and reason is getting pushed aside to promote wireless everything gold rush as the must have technology. So I can see why investors are interested in this company, but I do have to question the logic of all this.

But I think the worst part is the years of interoperability battles we look like we are going to have to suffer. There is a lot of sense in moving towards a completely open and licence free standard that anyone can use (plus it will save a lot of companies a lot of money in the long run) and I think a totally open and free standard is the only way we will bring the interoperability battle to an end.