Back to the future…
I started in the computer industry in the late ‘70’s. I didn’t work on mainframes, the norm in that era. I spent most of my waking hours on these new things called microcomputers. If you wrote software for a microcomputer, you were in absolute control. It was an era when could do anything you wanted or, more to the point, were capable of designing. True to the Wild West attitude of the time, before I graduated high school I owned a company which wrote, among other things, personal accounting software for Radio Shack’s TRS-80s. You had to pick your bets and choose which machine you wanted your software to run on. When machines such as IBM’s PC came along, we had to decide whether the device would take off and, if so, whether it would appeal to the demographics we were going after. In short, we spent our time porting our software so it would run on whatever was selling to our target market at any given time. In all cases you had to craft your application to get the most out of the device you were running on.
So why am I babbling about the past?
Well the answer is that we are back to that future but that future with an amazing potential to change more of the world.
Those of us who live in North America tend to have computers kicking about where ever we go or a laptop in our back pack or briefcase in case there is a possibility that we might get caught too far from the internet. That isn’t true in the rest of the world. There are lots of personal computers out there but most people, by a couple of orders of magnitude (4 billion within the next few years) access the network through their mobile phone.
So why are we back to the future? Well, those phones are very much like microcomputers in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. They are all different.
The good news is that there are so many more of them that it is much more viable to write applications for a specific phone but the problem is really for the end user who can only get some of the applications they want on any given device.
The really bad news is that we are back at exactly the same point the microcomputers were in the early 1980’s. We have to tweak or re-write our applications for each new device out there which means everybody is spending a lot of time re-doing things rather than spending their time innovating.
So what changed in the microcomputer industry?
I will keep my opinions about the state of the art, concurrent, 16-bit, multi-tasking operating systems which were common at the time and the emergence DOS to myself but the reality is that the fact that one operating system began to dominate greatly helped the microcomputer industry to become viable. More to the point, it made most users’ life a heck of a lot easier.
So does that mean we need to wait until Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, Apple and various others agree on a common operating system before we can feel confident that we have a truly viable industry focused on innovation for the end user? Not exactly.
The advantage we have this time around is that one fundamental thing is different about today’s devices. Whether they are smart phones, higher end feature phones or net-books, they fundamentally are designed around connectivity. That was something which was lacking in the early micro industry. The brilliant minds at CERN gave us the formula with HTML (and subsequent innovations such as CCS, xHTML, etc.) which allows for a presentation layer that will work on multiple devices no matter the operating system of choice.
While the operating system war heats up and vendors shake out, there is an amazing amount we can do to make applications usable on the largest number of devices using the browsers as they become more capable. As an added bonus, making use of the network to reach the computing ‘cloud’ also get us around a lot of the cost and power usage tradeoffs which are now required in order to run some of the more sophisticated applications.