(IDG) -- It's mosquito season again in New England, and I've been thinking about small, buzzing things that are annoying. How about all those gadgets and devices that are starting to talk to the Internet? You know: screen phones, smart handheld devices, WebTV - even new types of video games.

I wouldn't normally bring this up, because I long ago exhausted the topic in these pages by writing about the special perils of managing fleets of mobile computers, which get a lot worse when the devices fit in a coat pocket. They almost cost more to inventory and manage than you paid for them. By now you know how hard it is to keep track of those things, prove their worth, manage upgrades and so on.

Ubiquitous

What's got me thinking now is the idea that so many of those devices will be on the Internet. And they will be accessing (among others) the marketing, commerce, data warehousing and other line-of-business applications that businesses will increasingly offer from their Web sites. Which, in turn, will connect to corporate computers.

In fact, according to International Data Corp. (IDC) forecasts, by 2001, more than 40% of the devices shipped that connect to the Internet will be something other than PCs. By then, consumers will be buying more information appliances than PCs.

Sure, you won't have to manage them if, in fact, they're just more consumer gadgets. But you will have to accommodate them on your Web site. Wells Fargo & Co., for one, learned some tough lessons about frames, Java applets and larger-format screen displays in its Internet home-banking foray; for many customers, those devices made its Web site unusable.

Rule 1 in accommodating traffic from these devices: Optimize your site for the lowest common denominator. The IDC data indicates that, as non-PCs take hold, that denominator will go even lower. But that's not the only problem. As we automate our customers, more of those nameless consumers will access our corporate systems - and ask us why things don't work.

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It took a support specialist at American Airlines' Web site 20 minutes on the phone with me to discover that I couldn't log on to my AAdvantage account because I had the wrong date set in my computer. The system was timing out, and the cookies couldn't go back and forth, or something like that. But shouldn't this guy be fixing year 2000 code instead of talking to a casual user like me?

The increasing mobility of these devices also will keep us hopping. Now, portable items account for less than 20% of the installed base of devices we have to manage, support or send data and Web pages to. In five years, portable items will account for 50%.

Try troubleshooting that. Try capacity planning. Try staffing a help desk. Even try finding out which devices are the most common so you can optimize your applications.

The combination of devices, configurations, communications options, operating systems and browsers will grow by an order of magnitude. But those portable devices will be here - they're too handy to simply dismiss. We must make room for them in the IT tent.

Who knows? If we get good at dealing with them, maybe we'll gain some competitive advantage.

Gantz is senior vice president at IDC in Framingham, Mass. His Internet address is jgantz@idcresearch.com.