What Do WiMax, WiFi, Bluetooth and VOIP All Have In Common? A Very Active "Afterlife."

With the rise of LTE, we find great woe and tearing of hair among the supporters of WiMax. Intel, long a WiMAX booster, closed it's Taiwan WiMax office and it seems you can't swing a dead iPad these days without hitting another story about WiMax's woes and its upcoming demise in the face of LTE. There is a lamentable tendency among analysts and trade reporters to confuse "technology" with "business model." WiMAX, like WiFi and bluetooth, are technologies. They have particular uses. A number of early adopters, equipment makers, and investors hoped that these technologies would facilitate certain business models and use these business model predictions to promote the new technology. Reporters and analysts promptly confuse the two, often further compounding the error by swooning over ridiculous business model predictions, then rushing to declare the technology dead once the far-too-optimistic business predictions come to pass. This promptly creates an investment opportunity for those able to distinguish between technology and business model and hype from substance and adoption.