By Phil Jones
The five founding members of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group yesterday named Microsoft Corp as one of four companies which have joined them to create a Bluetooth Promoter group to lead the future evolution of the wireless interconnect standard. Microsoft’s sudden appearance at the top table of the Bluetooth community suggests that the Redmond, Washington desktop software company has concluded that ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ and will now cooperate with competitors to shape the next generation of wireless information technology.
3Com Corp, Lucent Technologies Inc, and Motorola Inc are the other three companies joining LM Ericsson Telefon AB, IBM Corp, Intel Corp, Nokia Oyj, and Toshiba Corp in the Bluetooth SIG’s new leadership group. Each of the new comers has the market stature and technology credentials to add substantial weight to the already powerful founding members as the Bluetooth community moves on from establishing a working specification, to ensuring true interworking and compatibility among the products of its 1,200 strong developer base.
However, it is Microsoft’s unlooked for entry into the SIG which may have the biggest impact. Having sat on the sidelines since Bluetooth was set up over two years ago, Mike Wehrs, group manager for product planning with Microsoft’s Windows CE division in Redmond, said the company is now prepared to throw substantial resource at Bluetooth. We’ve made a very large commitment up front, Wehrs said.
Wehrs and another Microsoft executive will be seconded full-time to Bluetooth SIG Promoter activities. And, next week, when the Bluetooth SIG formally announces the creation of nine new standards working groups at the second Bluetooth Developer Conference in Los Angeles, California, Wehrs said Microsoft expects to appointment chairman to one or more of the groups, and to appoint representatives to several more. He also said that Microsoft will invest significant dollars in developing Bluetooth standards, both cooperatively with other Bluetooth members, and for integration within its own products. However, the Windows CE division executive declined to elaborate on which products will be Bluetoothed first, but said his comapny’s involvement will be across the whole of Microsoft.
Wehrs said that Microsoft sees itself taking a stakeholder role in Bluetooth on behalf of the PC community, working to ensure that the future expectations of plug-and-play, wireless interoperability that PC users may have are not disappointed. Microsoft technologies will be transferred to the Bluetooth domain, and Bluetooth technologies will be brought into Microsoft’s development plans, he said.
While declining to pre-announce Bluetooth’s precise working group plans, or Microsoft’s likely role in them, Wehrs said there were three of four groups which the company hoped either to chair, or take an active role in. Among them is likely to be a proposed Personal Area Network (PAN) group, which will consider the future security, cross-platform function mapping and micro-cell hand-off issues associated with allowing groups of individuals to spontaneously exchange information, and share resources in meeting scenarios.
We have long been working on a personal area networking scenario said Wehrs, so that when people come together in a conference, they can interconnect their personal palm tops and lap tops. Now Microsoft’s development work will be shared with like-minded Bluetooth developers in a working group.
The same is likely to happen in a proposed Bluetooth working group focusing on enhanced service discovery, where Microsoft is keen to bring features of its Universal Plug and Play (UPP) technology into the wireless device domain, enabling palm tops and other devices to automatically recognize each other, and understand the different applications and physical resources each device may make available to the group.
Wehrs said that Microsoft is also likely to take an active role in two other proposed working groups: a location specific information group, that will allow Bluetooth devices to triangulate, and find the physical whereabouts of different machines; and, a proposed standards compatibility group. We have particular expertise in technology for testing the compatibility of products in an open environment, he said.
Microsoft’s arrival in the Bluetooth community should certainly make the interconnect standard a more credible and functionally richer development target for hardware and software vendors alike. However, the company’s arrival may also coincide with, if not directly trigger, the first serious rifts among a standards consortium which, by an industry’s standards, has enjoyed a remarkably harmonious history to date.
Already the group, which had originally expected to deliver commercial by year-end or soon after, is recognizing that writing a paper specification is a good deal harder than stabilizing the spec in products. Most now are talking about delivering product in the second half of next year, by which team the debate, or argument, over which technologies and features will feature in Bluetooth 2.0 and beyond will probably be in full swing.
