Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Commentary 4Mobility - Five Minutes To A Bluetooth Disaster! - 17 December 2002

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2002 12:23:28 -0500

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                           Five Minutes To A Bluetooth Disaster!

At the Recent Bluetooth developers conference, Mike McCarmon, executive director of the
Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group), challenged wireless product developers and
manufacturers to deliver devices that give customers a "five-minute out-of-the-box
experience." If accomplished, a customer buying a Bluetooth-enabled device would be able
to pair and use that device with another Bluetooth device within five minutes of opening
the package."

The Bluetooth SIG admitted that this will be a challenge. Having been a Bluetooth
supporter since being briefed on the concept many years ago, I believe that if it is going
to take five minutes for someone to configure a Bluetooth device to communicate with
another Bluetooth device, Bluetooth will die an undeserving death, and very quickly.

Research shows us that if people cannot download a page from the Internet within eight
seconds they won't bother and will move on to something else. We also know that the most
important thing for new wireless phone customers is to be able to walk out of a store,
punch a number into their new wireless phone and place a call. If the call cannot be
completed by the time they get to their car they get upset.

The promise of Bluetooth was that Bluetooth devices would detect other Bluetooth devices
and a simple point and click would "invite" them to connect. After reading that it will be
a challenge for the Bluetooth industry to meet a five-minute goal I am very much afraid
that Bluetooth will suffer the same fate as infrared (IrDA) as defined by the IrDA
organization and other great technologies that became burdened by engineers whose idea of
user friendly is for other techno savvy folks be able to make it work.

Let's examine some real world examples of how Bluetooth is supposed to make our lives
better and then invoke the "five minute" rule. Consider a meeting in a conference room. We
all arrive, each with our own Bluetooth enabled PDA and/or laptop. The presenter for
today's meeting has a PowerPoint presentation to share with us. Since we all have
Bluetooth devices, we can receive the presentation, open it on our own device and make
notes during the presentation. But first, we each must spend five minutes "joining" our
device to that of the presenter's. Even if we do this simultaneously, at least five
minutes of the meeting time will be wasted making the technology work. Will we spend the
time to do this? I dont think so. This is not the level of ease we were promised by the
Bluetooth folks three years ago.

In a car with a Bluetooth hands-free kit I must spend five minutes "joining" my Bluetooth
phone to my car kit and all is well and good. Then my wife needs to use my car because
hers is in the shop so she spends another five minutes joining her wireless phone to the
car kit. What if we let our daughter drive the car for a night out with her friends? Will
she take the five minutes required to join her phone to our car kit or will she decide to
use her phone in a non-hands free mode and perhaps get a ticket because we live in a state
where handheld phones are not permitted to be used while driving?

Bluetooth car kits should be installed in every rental car in the world. Hertz might be
the first, so I rent a car. I am Hertz Gold so I go directly to my car, throw my bag in
the open trunk, get into the car, set the seat and the mirrors and drive off. But wait! I
forgot to spend the five minutes needed to join my wireless phone with the Hertz car kit.
Perhaps I should pull off the side of the road and set it up. No, I'm running late so I'll
hold my phone to my ear.

The Threshold Of Pain

The threshold of pain is the amount of frustration and time a person will spend trying to
get something to work before giving up and deciding it isn't worth it. Is the Bluetooth
SIG so out of touch with reality that it honestly believes users will accept a five minute
setup to make a Bluetooth connection each time they want to connect to a new device over
the course of a week? If it isn't easy it wont be used! If it takes too much time to
configure it why would one bother with it?

I know that connections must be secure and I know that this is a complex issue. The
infrared community had tried and failed to solve these problems (until Palm made it work).
But when I was first introduced to Bluetooth I was told that the problems had been studied
and it was understood that connecting Bluetooth devices had to be simple, quick and easy.
So what happened? That the Bluetooth SIG is now saying five minutes of setup time is a
challenge to them is really disheartening to me.

In addition to this new "challenge," to the Bluetooth community, it was also announced
that the Bluetooth SIG's Web site (www.bluetooth.com) is being redesigned to include
product searching capabilities, a consumer glossary providing definitions of common
Bluetooth wireless terms and an introductory user's guide with basic tips and concepts for
troubleshooting.

What is all of this stuff? Consumers are going to purchase Bluetooth enabled wireless
phones and PDAs and then have to visit the Bluetooth site in order to figure out what to
do? If I have to visit a Web site in order to make a product I just bought work or to
understand the terminology to make two products work together, forget it! I have lived
without Bluetooth this long I can live without it going forward!

When Intel first called the press and analysts together, way too many years ago, to give
us a preview of Bluetooth it was still a concept that had been developed by Ericsson and
brought to Intel to commercialize, the premise was to provide a "wireless wire" that would
permit users to connect devices together simply and easily--a PDA to a wireless phone for
wide-area wireless voice and data communications or a number of notebook computers in the
same room so that files could be shared easily. We would be able to wear a single small
and light earpiece that would connect to our wireless phone, recognize when we entered our
office and connect to our office phone and even recognize when we arrived home and connect
to our home wireless phone.

The Motorola Piano technology that was proposed more than three years ago as the discovery
portion of Bluetooth worked great. I saw it demonstrated many times and experimented with
it on several occasions. Motorola was gracious enough to "give" the technology to the
Bluetooth SIG royalty free. Why has only a portion of this discovery layer been included
three years later? And why has it taken so long to reach the point where we will finally
see Bluetooth products enter the market?

My sources tell me that much of the ease-of-use technology that was originally to be
incorporated into Bluetooth was "killed" by Nokia, Ericsson and Microsoft. Microsoft
wanted to turn Bluetooth into a "plug-and-play" technology and Nokia and Ericsson's
motivation seems to be that the proposed technology was designed and developed by
Motorola. The Bluetooth SIG, I am sorry to say, has taken a truly great concept and wasted
years engineering it by committee.

Too many engineers from too many companies, each wanting to leave their own signature on
Bluetooth, have spent too much time trying to turn what should have been a simple
technology into something far too complex to be used by mere mortals. Simple for an
engineer is not simple for an average person. Remember DOS? Remember how much easier the
first Macintosh was to use? Remember that Microsoft got it right with Windows but it was
still too difficult for many folks until Windows 3.0? Even today you struggle to make your
computer work for you.

How many of you have infrared-equipped computers, PDAs and phones? How many of you use
this feature? Very few, I am sure, and why not? The answer is that IrDA has been too
difficult to configure and use. It has been installed as a standard option in notebook
computers for at least five years and but it wasn't until Palms PDA hit the market and
made infrared simple to use that anyone bothered with it.

The key phrases are ease-of-use and plug-and-play. If Bluetooth is to become a commodity
communications technology (which it should be), five minutes of user aggravation and setup
won't hack it.

                                     Andrew M. Seybold

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