Wireless Mobile Internet Technology: While telephone service is necessarily synchronous, computer applications need not be. Apps are evolving to support the mobilized workplace and lifestyle, so that when users lose connectivity, they do not lose their productivity. Read more on mobile computing applications, mobile computing equipment and asynchronous and synchronous communications.

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by Chris S. Thomas and Matt Gillespie. Intel Corp.

Wireless computing is taking the world by storm in much the same way as cell phones did some years ago. Wireless data access, including WiFi, is gradually becoming ubiquitous, but as with cell phone networks, there will always be geographic gaps in service availability. The difference is that, while telephone service is necessarily synchronous (for the most part, voicemail notwithstanding), computer applications need not be. Applications are evolving in order to support the mobilized workplace and lifestyle, so that when a user loses connectivity, they do not lose their productivity.

The Mobilized Software Initiative (MSI) is driving change in the industry at large to accommodate this change. Software must be intelligent enough to interpret changes in the environment well beyond the capacity of the traditional terminal-host environment. One dilemma for mobile users today is that online services typically follow a traditional terminal-host model, in which the client is tethered to the host, and where users must log into a central server in order to interact with their applications.

That design works poorly in a wireless world, where clients roam freely and must be able to work effectively in an environment of intermittent connectivity. If users log in and their connection drops in and out, they will get frustrated quickly if they have to log in again repeatedly. The expectation for users to be continually connected to the business environment is unrealistic in the mobilized context. Mobilized applications focus instead on being available, connectable or accessible, with built in resilience to network interruptions or transitions thru asynchronous communication mechanisms. Applications and services that continue to demand constant connectivity will become increasingly obsolete as the mobilized capabilities increase the productivity, reliability and expectations of mobile users.

Breaking down the tethered mentality
Currently, the opportunity for failure on the part of applications and service providers is high. As users start to mobilize, the threat of repeated error messages flooding call centers and yielding trouble tickets requiring application behavioral change is real.

Applications must be designed to support the full variety of ways that users may choose to work. Why make them work in such a way as to demand specific or continuous connectivity, since we know that connectivity is not always available? One powerful way to think of this shift is to recognize that many of the most–often-used connected applications already work in a mobility-friendly way. E-mail clients, for example, have for years typically assumed that they are offline, until they process a timed or manual prompt to send and receive to the server—then they go and determine whether a connection is available.

Client/server models where, for example, a browser must be connected to a Web site in order to function, are very frustrating to work with in an intermittently connected environment, but they have nevertheless become more prevalent in the past six or seven years as the Internet has grown exponentially. The nature of forcing people to go and get information, rather than pushing it out to them, precludes many applications and people from using the information at all.

One of my least-favorite manifestations of this shortcoming is the case of magazine publishers trying to get me to fill out some information in exchange for a free subscription. These offers typically come in email and require me to logon to their web site to register. They sit in my inbox until I have some spare time to look at them, which often happens when I am in transit and not connected. Thus, their plea for me to connect to their Web site and fill out a form is not successful.

If, on the other hand, they simply sent me an e-mail with the form included, I could fill it out offline to be sent automatically the next time I am connected. Analogous shifts in mentality that take advantage of asynchronous messaging would make many such user experiences more successful. The nature of the change is a productivity change. Liberating users from the tethered mentality affords them a competitive advantage, which in turn presents the opportunity for a competitive advantage to the independent software vendors (ISVs) that enable that productivity change.

Ushering in an new personal productivity explosion
Back in the 1960s, we had a strictly terminal-host model, where the user was logged into a monolithic central machine. You had to call a COBOL programmer to change a report in your business environment, which was laborious and costly for the user, the programmer, IT, and ultimately the business. In the mid-1980s, the rise of the PC and associated user-oriented applications changed all that, allowing individual users to create spreadsheets, reports, and databases that meet their needs for individual projects without external technical support.

We must now think in terms of what is going to enable the broadest market possible to adopt these capabilities. Standards that allow maximum interoperability of multiple platforms are needed to increase the likelihood of success. Using asynchronous web services standards, for example, mobilized software will allow for new user productivity solutions that look a lot like enterprise applications. Enterprise Application Integration environments will start to look a lot like client application integration spaces, targeting individual users with the capability to tie desktop applications together to communicate like enterprise applications through Web services.

Macromedia, for instance, is now is shipping Macromedia Central, which sets up a foundation based on client-side Web services infrastructure on which to build applications, allowing users to link them together to work as one. Another example of this modality is shown by their Movie Finder application, which automatically goes out and asynchronously grabs information like show times and reviews, caching it for offline use.