When you combine some of this, you immediately see that there is a lot of synergy with what Palm tries to do. The gap is that applying those principles to a consumer, and applying those principles to an enterprise framework are very different. And there are a number of things that you may not have to worry about at the consumer space that you have to worry about in enterprise. Things like security. Things like asset management. Things like maintainability and risk management.

Once you put critical information and critical functionality into a device, what is the cost of opportunity when that device is not available? And the best example for that is email. If you create the expectation that people can perform their email function from their handheld to the point where they don't need their laptop anymore, what happens when that email function is not available on the handheld? You know, you create a huge downside to it. To generate acceptance, you have to put it in the enterprise context and then go after industrial strength security and reliability.

DG: Can you spend a moment or two talking about the provisioning issue as it relates to handhelds?

JM: If you want to roughly describe what the provisioning is, it's the process from the point when you get an off-the-shelf box with a device and the point where that device is completely enabled to perform the functions you need to perform. So everything that goes from Point A to Point B, we call it provisioning. And we define it like that because we don't want to get into the procurement side of provisioning like how does the box get to you. So once we frame provisioning in that way, you can imagine that, again, how important that is.

There are different ways to do provisioning. If you do centralized provisioning you can preload everything that a user ever would need into that device and then you deliver that to that user. That is a very costly way and the issue is, probably three days after the user gets the device, most likely that software will already be obsolete and need to be updated. So even though that's kind of the traditional method of provisioning, the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is not very efficient with that approach.

Let's agree on the premise that one of the critical functional aspects of these solutions to be adopted quickly is personalization. So if personalization is a requirement, how do you add the personalization step into the provisioning? In other words, how do users select what they want to do and see on their devices? That should be fairly streamlined and it should also be part of the provisioning.

Once you personalize, you have the third aspect of provisioning, which is security. Or, how do you make sure that, number one, if there is any personal information traversing the line that it's going be secure enough? But most important, how do you know that no unauthorized devices are going to go through your network and potentially access confidential information?

So, again, in the provisioning side you have to make it very seamless to capture any information that may be required to secure that device without imposing a burden on the user that may prompt him to not even go through the process.