Obvious Diversion

Originally announced in 1999, Bluetooth is a technology for letting devices communicate wirelessly over a short range, roughly 10 meters, and it has turned out to be a failure. Those who have watched Bluetooth drag along over it’s history have heard year after year that this year will be “The Year of Bluetooth.” We were told that we would have an inexpensive way to tear the wires out of our keyboards and mice, have our phones share information with our computers and much more. Five years later, it hasn’t happened for the majority of consumers.

Blame #1: The Small Margin Hardware Industry

We’ve been down this same road before with wireless accessories. I remember in the early 90s there was some excitement about a wireless technology, the name of which I can’t seem to remember, that would get rid of the cables on mice and keyboards. (If memory serves me, it may have actually been based on RF.) I heard it was coming, I saw it advertised and then it quickly disappeared. Why? In the cutthroat pricing war that makes the PC industry, the added cost of a wireless mouse and keyboard made for a system that was less competitive, not more. Customers wanted a faster machine at a reasonable price and there just wasn’t room in the slim profit margins that PC makers took to make two cables disappear. I also heard that there was a tiny delay in this early implementation between the time you moved your mouse and the reaction on the screen. As anyone who’s ever had their TV audio get just the slightest bit out of sync with the video can attest to, such a delay can cause a huge irritation.

Bluetooth is running into this same problem. No major PC manufacturer that I know of actively pushing Bluetooth as a standard component of their PCs. If anything, it’s marketed as a wireless mouse and keyboard package that is an expensive luxury for most, expensive relative to the default wired versions. Even Apple, which likes to include forward thinking features into it’s hardware (Gigabit Ethernet comes to mind), has an internal slot for Bluetooth, but generally doesn’t include the actual Bluetooth module in it’s hardware. Mobile phone manufacturing is equally competitive with most phones not shipping with Bluetooth at all.

Blame #2: The Lack of a Baseline Solution

Over the past few years, those who have dared to buy a Bluetooth phone and try to sync it with Windows have been met with rocky results. When the Sony Ericsson t68i mobile phone first came out, I got one immediately with the notion that I would be able to easily sync people’s phone numbers. There would be no more thumbing in names, a task I simply didn’t have the patience for. My enthusiasm and Bluetooth’s promises did not work out. After hours of toying around with the software available, I gave up and finally found a way to do it through infrared. It was less than ideal though as I couldn’t just hit a sync button. I had to move contacts over one at a time. The whole experience was disappointing.

In talking to people about my experience, I was often told that Bluetooth was difficult to implement, that the technology wasn’t mature enough. Hard to work with or not, it clearly wasn’t impossible to make an easy to use implementation. Anyone who has seen Apple’s iSync and it’s support for Bluetooth has had their socks knocked off. It just works. More than that, iSync supports a decent list of phones from Nokia to Sony Ericsson to Siemens. Apple stepped forward and created a way to make Bluetooth easy, Unfortunately, Apple is too small a part of the market to encourage cell phone manufacturers to step forward with affordable Bluetooth phones. What we needed was a similarly easy implementation on Windows to spur PC makers and cell phone makers to step forward with Bluetooth as a default feature.

A Cure is Coming, but Is It Too Late?

There is some hope. The recently released Service Pack 2 for Windows XP seems to have an improved implementation of Bluetooth. Early reports say that although the hardware support is a little limited right now, the implimentation is much more usable. It’s the first step towards making Bluetooth easy on Windows and, therefore, for the majority of the population. I can’t speak to the reasons why it took Microsoft so long to create this implimenation. I simply wish it had come sooner.

Any Lessons Learned?

The adoption of any new technology often comes when the leading operating system has baseline support for others to work off of. Over five years after the announcement of Bluetooth, we have that platform available for the majority of computer users in Windows XP Service Pack 2. Is it too late? Have PC manufacturers gone too long without it that they will not cut into their profit margins with a Bluetooth module now? Are the cell phone manufacturers too enamored with adding cameras to phones that the added cost of Bluetooth simply won’t make it into anything but models too expensive for most consumers?

There are plenty of signs that the industry is already looking for something else to succeed where Bluetooth has failed. Whatever that thing may be, whether a variation of 802.x or something to be labeled Bluetooth 2, let’s hope that some lessons have been learned. The specifications can be laid out, the hardware can be manufactured and shipped, and drivers can be written for the popular operating systems, but without a reasonable user experience to go with it, you have nothing but a failed product.