Pushing through a new and misunderstood technology

Pat King
Global electronics strategist, Michelin North America

I'm a member of the AIM Global RFID Experts Group, and I'm leading a workgroup where we're writing the quality standard for RFID tags and how you determine it. So I [speak at] a lot of conferences.

Last year, the conferences had vendor attendees listed in the 10-to-12 range. Now there are 50, 100, 200 vendors. That to me is frightening because the market hasn't taken off and these people are trying to find business, which means they're trying to make business. A lot of them aren't prepared. In addition, the standard - [EPCglobal's UHF Generation 2 air interface protocol, commonly referred to as] Gen2 - is only emerging, and the parts required to make it successful are barely available. The timing has it that there are more suppliers than there are customers or parts. That's incredibly frightening.

I was at a conference recently and - I get a little angry about this stuff - I instructed the audience to go into the vendor group, and if they saw any vendor demonstrating RFID with empty cardboard boxes, they needed to physically pick up the boxes and declare the vendor as a fraud. Those of us who have been in this industry, practicing RFID, graduated from demoing empty boxes 15 years ago. That was cool 15 years ago when RFID really was science fair technology.

I fly on any given week to Japan, Korea, Singapore, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, England - anywhere there's an opportunity to interact with one of our competitors, the standards bodies, or customers. When I originally forecast my role for this year with my boss, I thought I could stop traveling because of the genesis of the Gen 2 standard. The year before, the goal was easy - to create a single standard. Now that we're getting toward a single standard, we have a new problem: An incredible hoard of incompetent idiots are now showing up on every doorstep claiming to be experts at this single solution. And so now I even have a bigger risk of our competitors or customers, listening to them and then forcing some implementation of the standard that actually isn't [compliant].