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January 10th
Simple is very important. Wired is too complicated.
–An unnamed Sony executive at CES - NYT’s Bits I’ll always agree on the simplicity point, but wireless has plenty of problems of its own. (As the president of Samsung recently discovered).
Wireless connectivity has the unfortunate problem of ‘zero mapping’ (my own term, I’m sure there’s a better one out there. Consumers are at a point where plugging one device into another is technically familiar. While the complexity of these connections can have its own issues (e.g. Microsoft’s ‘Plug-and-Play’), conceptually it’s the same as plugging into a wall socket.
When dealing with wireless communication across disparate devices, no such clear mapping exists. Ask any typical consumer how something like near-field communication works, and you’ll receive a cryptic response: “Technology.” They might as well have said it was “magic,” which I think would suit Arthur C. Clarke just fine.
One notable exception is the old 900Mhz cordless phone. It was not a case of two devices interfacing with one another, but rather one product split into halves.
