Platform Agnostic Is The Way To Go

Fred Wilson (Photo credit: Lachlan Hardy)

Fred Wilson has revisited his blog post Mobile First, Web Second that was inspired by a blog post of mine.

I think Mobile First, Web Second made perfect sense at the time, but that was an aggression needed to balance out the over emphasis on the Old Web we had seen to that point.

But the truth is it is not web first or mobile first. It is neither. It is user first. And the best applications going forward will be platform agnostic. As long as you use it, it does not matter what platform you use it on. And your behavior, your interactions will be collected in the Big Data world to glean insights on you - not necessarily to serve ads in sneaky ways - that can have huge commercial values. LinkedIn is a great example on that monetization strategy. LinkedIn does not make money because you visit it several times a day. You don't. How many times are you going to look at your own resume? Unless you are unemployed and are anal about that condition.

Mobile First, Web Second - Fred Wilson's most popular and most quoted blog post of 2010 - was right on for 2010. But with hindsight we have to see it was there to counterbalance Web And Web Alone, the thesis that had been ruling the space for more than a decade to that point, more like a decade and a half.

The app of today and tomorrow has to exist on all platforms - the laptop, the tablet, the smartphone - and more platforms than are in vogue today. Think wristwatch, think TV screen, think movie screen. Think platforms made possible by the gesture - NUI, Natural User Interface - going mainstream.

It is not about the platform, it is about the user.

Vibhu Norby misses the point. Although what he has said are points worth considering by those who are thinking monetization in the short run.

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To Natural User Interface

Image via Wikipedia

Technology Review: Microsoft's 3-D Strategy: Microsoft has joined the wave of companies betting that 3-D is the next big thing for computing. .... treating the device as a natural extension of how they interact with the world around them. ..... have people shopping and searching in 3-D as well. .... move computing from today's graphical user interfaces to the "natural user interface" ..... gesture and voice .... a natural interface frees up attention and concentration so that they can focus better on the task at hand .... processing high-definition, 3-D video in real time would strain the capabilities of most home computers today .... the average person views 3-D technology as something used on special occasions, not as a day-to-day technology

The graphical user interface itself was a huge jump. Before that you had to enter exotic commands into your machine. The natural user interface - or 3D computing - promises to be a similar big jump, comparatively a bigger jump.

Just like a big chunk of humanity never bothered with landlines and went straight to mobile phones, I can see the same thing happening with the natural user interface. The natural user interface could end up the majority of humanity's first introduction to the full fledged computing experience.

A computer is not a tool. Computing is an environment.

eMarketer: Email Still Tops Facebook for Keeping in Touch: 86% of survey respondents said they used email to share content, while just 49% said they used Facebook ..... ages 18 to 24, reverses the trend, with 76% sharing via Facebook, compared with 70% via email. .... Rather than focusing on sharing content they thought the recipients would find helpful or relevant (58%), most respondents cared more about what they thought was interesting or amusing (72%).

Technology Review: Craig Mundie's Cloud Vision: cloud computing--the trend shifting computer processing and storage away from desktop computers and onto distributed computers across the Internet. .... Traditional procedural programming languages tend to mask or in fact squeeze out the inherent parallelism in many problems just as a byproduct of the structure of the languages. How you get programs to be correct at larger and larger scales across this distributed concurrent environment is another problem. ...... "Look, I just expect to be able to listen to my music no matter what device I happen to pick up." .... what I call this composite platform, where you've got a balanced set of roles between what you expect the cloud to provide and what you expect the clients to provide themselves.

Related articles

• Microsoft's 3-D Strategy (technologyreview.in)
• Microsoft Research offers 3-D (tech.mit.edu)
• Microsoft Sees Many Uses for Gesture-controlled Interfaces (pcworld.com)
• Room sized 3D computers (blogs.msdn.com)
• Microsoft demos Lightspace natural world interface (v3.co.uk)
• More Like Us (blogs.technet.com)
• Microsoft LightSpace...and my new gig (blogs.msdn.com)
• Microsoft explores natural user interface ideas with interactive paper prototypes (istartedsomething.com)
• Deep Inside Xbox 360 Kinect and Why It's the Future of Microsoft [Kinect] (gizmodo.com)