Extremely Rich Media

By Walt Brown, Dwight Irving

January 27, 2003

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I know you. You're waiting for someone to come up with the next killer app to light up all those fibers you've buried; something sticky to run on all those wireless handsets you've equipped with enough smarts to run the space shuttle; and something profitable to justify your company's investment in a one-LAN-does-it-all box. Well, here's some news for you: It's not gonna come from wherever you're looking.

Let's take a look back into history. Back when VisiCalc was just a gleam in Dan Bricklin's eye, we were playing Adventure on DEC minis or filling in data fields on an IBM 3270 terminal. The killer app then was expected to be something that took our spoken word and put it onto paper. This would free our administrative assistants to do their real job of running our business while we went out and played golf. If we were doing anything with financial spreadsheets, we were filling in simple blanks on a word processing form. Who would have thought that the delivery of an automated spreadsheet having a user interface consisting of semi-secret key commands announced the beginning of a paradigm shift?

Well, the same is true today. We're still trying to do the same old things of call routing, message storage, multi-party discussions, and Short Messaging Services (SMS—the third millennium's equivalent of passing a note in biology class) faster, cheaper, and with less error and inconvenience. What's really needed are ideas about new things to do that will get us beyond the incremental improvements and into the realm of a radical disruption.

That search for the New Thing is the idea behind Extremely Rich Media (xRM). The Extremely Rich Media concept includes user-oriented services that illustrate all of the basic trends in service delivery architectures, using many familiar service components and features, but taken to extreme measures. These xRM solutions may not be right for you, but the technologies and interactions that make up these solutions are directly applicable to all communications service delivery environments.

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