WAC Who?

At the end of the Mobile World Congress this year there was the usual distribution of stuff that nobody wanted to take home. The day before a dude was going round distributing black T-shirts like he couldn't get rid of them fast enough. They had a red logo on them that looked like WAG. On closer inspection the logo is actually WAC for Wholesale Applications Community.

This might as well have been called YAUOIDTF (Yet Another Useless Operator Initiative Doomed To Fail) as it's unstated objective was to overtake the App Store models of Apple, Google et al. You don't need to be an industry expert to realise that a committee of 48 large, competitive organisations are never going to agree to anything useful. Just look at BONDI, OMTP and JIL if you need proof.

The only good news out of this is that the development that was done has been acquired by a good company: apigee. Some bits and pieces are being picked up by GSMA and W3C who are further proof of the snail like progress of non-commercial standardisation. More information over at Rethink.

And of course we still have our T-shirts.