What's your wireless strategy? Before you answer, take a moment to consider some recent history.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, perhaps the second most frequently asked question was: "What's your internet strategy?"

I always thought it was a peculiar sort of enquiry, not unlike: "What's your profit strategy?"

But those were heady times, when each week we were told that everything would be profoundly different: business would be different, and so would food and insurance and plants and maths.

The same thinking that drove "What's your internet strategy?" was expressed in those magazines with cover stories that always sounded like How Poodles.com Will Kill Wal-Mart.

I recently read an article with some vintage weirdness conjured up in 1996 by John Perry Barlow, a guy some believed to be a visionary.

Here's a snippet: "Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind. You have no sovereignty where we gather ... We will create a civilisation of the mind in cyberspace."

Now, maybe I've been missing something important for the past seven years since Barlow severed all ties to flesh and steel, but that type of thinking strikes me as a tad narrow.

At the time, when he'd say it in coffee shops or at glamorous conferences, there were probably lots of folks who jumped to their feet screaming: "Right on!"

Delusion, it seems, can be infectious. Just look at the stock investments we made in those days.

So the question of "What's your wireless strategy?" is popping up more and more these days, and I think we all need to think long and hard about the question more than the answer.

Is it about 3G or G3 or 802.11 or WiFi or Bluetooth? Or is it about what people will actually do with these things, and what they wouldn't dream of doing with them?

How can wireless technologies help us impart more value to our customers and within our own company and among our partners?

This isn't semantics - the wrong question posed even at the right time will lead us down some very unproductive paths.

I'm extremely bullish about the potential of wireless technologies, and their application in the right place for the right job, to bring enormous opportunities to businesses and consumers.

But a glimpse at our recent technology past will tell us that wireless is a means and not an end, and that the question "What's your wireless strategy?" should be handled very carefully.

bevans@cmp.com

(C) 2002 CMP Media LLC.