What I Hope I Don’t Hear at Mobility Field Day 4

With another Mobility Field Day 4 coming up soon, I can’t help but ponder what this year’s briefings will bring. (If you’re not familiar with Mobility Field Day or the Field Day franchise, have a look here.) As I bang this blog out, the agenda features:

• Aruba
• Cisco
• Fortinet
• Metageek
• Mist
• …and a secret company you’ll all find out about during the event

This list may or may not grow a little, we never know right up until the last minute. As is, it’s a nice mix of old-guard industry leaders, up-and-comers, crowd favorites, and tool-makers. The event is gonna sizzle as each vendor attempts to show their newest offerings and best face, and I’m both proud and priveleged to be in attendance.

That being said- As a loooong-time Wireless Doer and frequent delegate for Field Day events, I’d like to share some of what I sincerely hope I DO NOT see and hear at this awesome event. This is a voice from the trenches speaking…

• AI and Machine Learning as THE THING. Given the line-up of pesenting vendors, I promise that you’ll get intoxicated if you take a drink everytime you hear “AI” or “machine learning” during MFD4. I’m all for letting the world know that these processes are at work under the hood- but companies also have a way of overselling buzzwords. Just because a vendor has incorporated artifical intelligence, machine learning, SDeverything, analytics, etc, it doesn’t mean the product won’t ultimately be problematic. There needs to be more to the presentation than “AND WE FREAKIN’ USE AI- NOW CUT US A P.O.!”
• Over-Licensed Proprietary Features Masked as Innovation. Vendors have the right to charge whatever they want, and some have certainly turned complex licensing paradigms into huge cash cows.

  Hear me now vendors: license away- but know that fair play counts. And some of you have lost your sense of fair play in favor of squeezing every rediculous cent out of long-time loyal customers with obscene, over-complicated license paradigms that are poorly disguised as “innovative”.  You can show us the most useful and revolutionary features in the world, but when even your own sales folk get tripped up in the complexity of licensing, the aftertaste is not worth using the feauture set.

• BMW Pricing for Ford Fiesta Feature Sets.  If it’s buggy, incomplete, “coming in Q1 next year”, bundled with a slew of other functions we really don’t want, or implemented with an out-of-touch developer’s view on wireless, it is not worth a premium. Back to the fair play thing- roadmap feautures are fine. But don’t charge me today for what I can’t use for 6-12 months. Or expect customers to be thrilled to pay for a laundry list of features they don’t need to create the illusion of some kind of wonderful deal is at hand. Be San Jose and let your merits carry you, and not Detroit- I’d rather have another vascetomy than visit a car dealership.
• A New House Made of Crap is Still a House Made of Crap. There are product sets on the market that are long in the tooth and perpetually problematic and buggy. The delegates in the rooms at MFD4 will be all too familiar with hidden TCO that comes with lack of QA and rushed-out-the-door code and hardware. I sincerely hope that we don’t hear about “new” anything being added to product sets that need to be sunsetted for everyone’s benefit. In this spirit I would also like to hear honest explanations about how whatever new stuff is coming is developed with higher QA standards than in the past applied. It’s fun seeing RF test facilities and such, but the radios usually aren’t the issue- it’s substandard code that runs the radios. It’s hard to get excited about new features added to old problems.
• Dahboard Fever. Marketing departments love to wow us: “each of your network users will have 87 IoT devices on them by next year- YoUR NETWORK IS NOT READY”. Besides baseless huge numbers and predictions of overwhelm, another trick is the accross-the-board generalizations that we all have deep, deep problems that only one more dashboard can solve. So what if you have more dashboards now than you can monitor- this next one is THE fix, and will scrape all of the dumb off your ass to bring clarity at long last. Pffft.

You’ll notice that my little list here really doesn’t just apply to Mobility Field Day. To me, it’s just common sense narrative that applies to vendor relationships day in and day out. But I also know that too often product managers and C-levels have a distorted view of how wonderful their stuff is, and hopefully Field Day gets us a little closer to honest, direct dialogue with those vendor bigs who may only get filtered feedback.

There is a lot to get excited about right now out there in WLAN Industryland… 802.11ax, WPA3, 5Gish stuff, new operating systems, fresh analysis resources, and a slew of technologies all ready to propel our networks and the industry forward. But it has to be based in reality, attainable, affordable, and implemented with STABILITY for end users in mind.

See you at Field Day.

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Note: on Twitter, follow @TechFieldDay and #MFD4 for this event, August 14-16