What a difference a couple years and huge market demand for slightly new products make. WiFi's explosion is the well known example - albeit wireless LANs were sort of taking off rather slowly, until 802.11's breakthrough year of 1999. For example, read this description of one goal of EV-DO (was called HDR in 2000 "High Data Rate") from the gurus at QUALCOMM as described in their 2000 paper

"In fact, one need not necessarily look beyond corporate boundaries; professional employees often spend nearly as much time in company conference rooms as in their own offices, and rarely are such rooms equipped with the number of ports need to connect the majority of participants laptops."

In short, there is a demand for wireless broadband in the office. QC predicted that HDR would fill that market demand, and while EV-DO must be considered a "success" next to WCDMA data, the real success has come from home and enterprise installations of cheap wifi gear.

Predicting market demand is quite an art, but some make it look easy. The QUALCOMM team was prescient in their sense of a gigantic demand for mobile broadband - and why not? As a typical Fortune 1000 company, they had thousands of employees scattered over 20 buildings 20 minutes north of downtown San Diego. What was atypical at QUALCOMM (well, normal for many CA high tech companies, but not normal among most Fortune 1000 companies in the 90s) was the email culture that permeated the organization from CEO Irwin Jacobs on down. What was typical at QUALCOMM was the propensity for too many meetings. So, combine too many meetings (often in other buildings than the employee's office building) with an email culture where 100+ emails/day is normal (pre spam era) and voila! You have a giant demand for mobile broadband. While their argument was correct from a market standpoint, and their design was optimum for a migrating from plain-old IS-95, it was not the quick and dirty technology that 802.11 was from a consumer standpoint. That is, they understood the latent demand perfectly. But EV-DO was a carrier's technology, not an enterprise/home technology. That's were WiFi cam in...the rest is history in the making.



At the same time, the explosion of portable music was occurring. Consumer electronics giant Sony was the leader in rapid prototype and consumer product development. They had shown with the invention of the Walkman, that they had the vision for designing products for latent, but apparently unknown, mobile music market. So, what was their solution? The stick. Using their proprietary "Magic Gate" technology they had quite a product..but good god, using it was a pain...all due to DRM issues. They finally admitted this week that they had failed to capture a market they KNEW existing and left it to Apple to do the job.