Ambient, stop whining

Mike Wendland blogs about whining from Ambient Devices: they want Microsoft to open the DirectBand network (which MSN Direct and SPOT use) to anyone who wants to transmit over it. Ambient makes some (actually rather cool) devices that receive data over a variety of existing networks (including pager and GPRS). However, they don’t like it that, after spending tons of money on building DirectBand, Microsoft isn’t eager to let them use it. Fancy that. Alan Reiter calls DirectBand a walled garden, and perhaps it is, but there’s no alternative technology that meets the price, size, and power consumption constraints that MS faced– given those limits, it was FM subcarrier or nothing, and I don’t think it’s fair to criticize them for not opening the network they built to J. Random Competitor.