WiFi No Shows

Starbucks and T-Mobile have made a big push to establish 802.11b “hot spots” around the country, but so far no one is buying! That’s perhaps not unexpected, since Wi-Fi is still somewhat of an early adopter technology, but the extremely small take rate — just 25,000 out of 22 million Starbucks customers — is surprisingly low. As usual in the New Economy, making a viable business model out of a new technology is proving harder to implement than the initial plans suggest.