I think, in the sense of handhelds, they have that potential for the right business processes to become the remote controls of the enterprise. The more pervasive the wireless transport becomes, m-business and mobility and wireless which has become an integral part of everything we do--machine to machine, person to person, and any combination of those--anywhere where there is a communication could potentially be streamlined by the use of wireless. I think there's going to be new business models that are going to come out of this.

Say you combine wireless with peer-to-peer. When you put those two together, peer-to-peer and wireless, I think there's going to be a rethinking of the traditional model of design of everything that we have done around technology for the last 20 years; it breaks up. So, I think there's going to be some radical new applications that we will see within the next five to ten years that will completely disintermediate a lot of the things we do today. For a simple example, your printer will talk with your computer and it will talk with the provider of toner and there will be a total disintermediation of those processes because the transfer to enable that will be so pervasive and so cheap that it will be easy to do.

DG: Is there any special message you'd like to leave with our readers as we end our interview?

JM: The main message would be to reiterate something that I said before, which is that we, as a community and as a practice, need to resist the temptation to just implement technology for the sake of technology. We all have it in our blood and we love to do that. But this is one of those technologies that you really need to step back, especially in the enterprise, and take a look as to where it makes sense to use the technology that will add value to the user and will add value to the enterprise. I think unless we do that, we will not get significant traction in the enterprise because we will not generate the value required for that.

I think anybody who has take that approach, if anything, has seen their budgets for wireless significantly increase out of very clear ROI and business cases. I think that the benefit of that is that we basically elevate the importance of the technology because it becomes clear what it can do for individuals and for the organizations.

Michael Connick is a Senior Project Manager at BusinessEdge Solutions, Inc. He can be reached at mconnick@monmouth.com. You can also visit his Palm handheld oriented Web site at http://www.monmouth.com/~mconnick/palm.htm.