Imagine the convenience: You saunter into a strange office and, without wires, your laptop can instantly send to the nearby printer. Your personal digital assistant can collect e-mail, transmit and receive faxes, or download a presentation from the office network. You can use your cellphone to buy something from the vending machine.

This is the dream being promised by the developers of Bluetooth, a short-range standard for high-speed wireless communication. The consortium developing Bluetooth—including heavyweights Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson, International Business Machines Corp., Intel Corp., Nokia Corp., Toshiba Corp., 3Com Corp., Lucent Technologies Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Motorola Inc.—is ballyhooing the standard as the next revolution in digital technology.

But, though I’m bullish on mobile electronic devices, I’m afraid the consortium’s plan has gaps as obvious as a seven-year-old wishing for her two front teeth.

The biggest problem is that the Bluetooth group is taking a formal approach that stifles innovation because it is at odds with the principles that have made the Internet so popular.

For instance, the way Bluetooth is designed means devices are expected to serve under the control of a single, master device, such as a cellphone, PDA, or laptop computer. Thus, Bluetooth replaces the wires that would run from the master to each of these devices. In other words, someone could have a headset that connected to his cellphone, and a small fax/scanner/printer that also connected to his cellphone, each without wires. However, invisible wires create problems. Bluetooth has yet to standardize an obvious and simple way to "unplug" the headset from the cellphone and "plug" it into a laptop to listen to music downloaded from a compact disc.

This wire-replacement approach of Bluetooth’s gives up the "network effects" that occur with the Internet, where every networked device can talk to every other networked device. Each networked device that hooks into the Internet makes the network more valuable, by creating a bigger audience for others to reach. With Bluetooth, though, each use removes just one wire; it does nothing to create a powerful network of Bluetooth users.

With Bluetooth, innovation is managed centrally, to ensure standardization. Any use that builds a capability onto the Bluetooth standard protocol has to be registered with the consortium first. This approach is common with computer hardware, where all decisions pretty much have to be right the first time, because they’re irreversible. The approach is, however, not common with software, which can be updated on the fly. With software, the normal approach is to innovate first and worry about standardizing later.

Because the Bluetooth consortium is applying hardware-like standards to software, it is inhibiting innovation. Registering takes time. If you look at the Internet, you see that programmers had the chance to try out such ideas as instant messaging, without having to ask permission. In general, users of technology create the novel applications that fuel growth, so it is efficient to give the users options to innovate and the tools to do it with. Bluetooth, by having its backers prescribe what innovation is possible, are forgoing the chance to have users and entrepreneurs attempt all sorts of potentially powerful experiments.

Bluetooth development is being done as it might have been in a Stalinist economy. Central planners are making all the decisions, rather than let a market economy develop. And we all know what happened to the Soviet system.

Bluetooth’s developers are making a similar mistake by treating the Internet as a second-class citizen. Bluetooth devices are a closed system. They are designed to talk to only each other. The Bluetooth standard is not set up so that, say, a PDA could talk to a computer and wirelessly pull information from the Internet. The Bluetooth consortium seems to hope it can build a world that can be completely controlled, walled off from everything else, but that’s like thinking East Germany could ignore the prosperity of West Germany. I wouldn’t bet against the Internet anytime soon. Bluetooth’s developers, by doing just that, are reducing the value of their technology.

By distancing themselves from the Internet, Bluetooth’s developers are also giving up access to some important security standards that are evolving online.

There is, of course, an obvious need for wireless networks like those that Bluetooth will make possible. It will be great to be able to easily create tiny ad hoc workgroups in adjacent cubicles, on airplanes, or at outdoor work sites. 3Com has even experimented with wireless networks at baseball games, so that fans with PDAs and cellphones can chat among themselves, question sports writers, or even ask the blond along the third-base line for a date.

And, so far, Bluetooth has come through with a number of critical requirements. Bluetooth-based connections, which occur in networks called picocells, can overlap and operate independently in the same space. Bluetooth engineers are also doing a good job of ensuring that Bluetooth devices consume little power and are inexpensive, which are absolute musts if Bluetooth is to run on such mass-market devices as cellphones and PDAs.

But Bluetooth doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It has competition. And, without fanfare, a rival wireless technology has been spreading like kudzu among technology’s young cognoscenti. The technology, called 802.11b, transmits many times faster than Bluetooth, over a much-wider, 150-meter radius. More importantly, the design approach is everything Bluetooth’s is not. The technology lets any device talk to any other. It is also "open," meaning that anyone can use it in any way, even to innovate in directions that its developers hadn’t expected.

On the minus side, 802.11b devices’ power consumption is greater, and the cost will remain significantly higher than individual Bluetooth hookups are projected to be in several years. Yet, if you visit U.S. university campuses and Silicon Valley watering holes, you’ll see the increasingly ubiquitous 802.11b—which allows anyone to set up a network for less than $500. Major universities have even discovered the need to coordinate equipment purchases to ensure that 802.11b networks in student dorms and research labs can talk to each other. Gathering places, like coffee shops and airport lounges, are racing to install networks based on 802.11b to attract laptop-carrying customers. Because it costs next to nothing to deploy 802.11b access points that allow dozens of users to share a high-speed connection, users get high-speed Internet access "for free" or a low-cost membership.

The interest is driving innovation. Soon, new variants of 802.11b will appear that offer much higher speeds and lower power consumption.

As a result, my guess is that Bluetooth is destined to be deployed only in specialized applications. Its strength will initially be in connecting simple peripherals, like headsets. In a few years, Bluetooth will overcome the problems associated with its design, but that will be too late for the technology to come close to fulfilling the claims now being made on its behalf.

Reed, a Boston-based systems technologist and DiamondCluster fellow, has spent almost four decades creating systems to exchange signals with alien intelligences in cyberspace. He can be reached at dpreed@reed.com.