Perhaps I’m letting my Macintosh religion get the best of me, but I have to take a bit of an issue with this line from the VoIP Watch blog entry Andy posted about the fusion of AT&T and Intel:
Intel already is inside every PC and PDA that matters.
My religious zealotry aside, I can’t help but question the ability of this joint venture to do anything really beneficial. Intel’s role in Wi-Fi is largely peripheral and somewhat opportunistic in my eyes (the Centrino marketing campaign is little more than an attempt to brand Wi-Fi as an Intel creation). AT&T have been showing a frustrating tendency to shift their strategy for bypassing the RBOCs every year or so (Cable, anyone? UNE, anyone? Dixie cups a strings, anyone?). Add to this the fact that the powers that be at AT&T still dont really get IP even after all these years.
Add to this the rousing success that Cometa, the joint venture of AT&T, Intel and IBM, which was supposed to set the Wi-Fi hotspot world on fire, somehow only managed to launch press releases. Theres not a great track record of success for either of these companies in the space into which they now both tread.
