Comments on: Phones! Now With Multitasking! Why Mobile Is About To Have Its Web Revolution.

By: BillJohnOnline999

BillJohnOnline999 — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 04:11:00 +0000

Mobile Phone may be the next revolution of web revolution. Because mobile phone has a great features and advantages. now the feature of Mobile Phone is same with PC. Also there is the example of "Samsung Galaxy S IV - In-Depth Review" for great mobile phone technology.

By: johnbattelle

johnbattelle — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:37:00 +0000

Appreciate the riff!

By: Michael Brill

Michael Brill — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:00:00 +0000

Put me in the bucket that believes web apps will ultimately dominate native… just put a half-dozen native control frameworks directly into the mobile browser, add associated HTML tags and game over. Not sure why it hasn’t been done already… well, I know why Apple hasn’t done it!

But I guess what I’m pointing to is a future online experience that is a bit closer to program trading than casual browsing. Tell the computer what you want (explicitly or through inference), not how to do it. Yes, the things we call web technologies (html, js, http, etc.) are hugely important… but maybe more value is to be derived by their use in the cloud. Their use on devices becomes relatively trivial because it can be. [apologies for going off-topic... I'm sort of one-track right now... yes, better copy/paste would be better on my iPhone!]

By: johnbattelle

johnbattelle — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 15:55:00 +0000

You are definitely in the minority here, but I hope soon the mobile world will move out of its AOL phase

By: johnbattelle

johnbattelle — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 15:40:00 +0000

I wouldn’t count web like models out, Michael. Perhaps not just like we understand the web today, but in essence, I think the value of an open, interlinked ecosystem is just too large to NOT develop in some way.

By: Anuj Agarwal

Anuj Agarwal — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 10:28:00 +0000

Believe me or not. I still personally use a feature phone. My mom, dad and everyone else use an iphone or some android smartphone. When im at home i use their phone to access some apps. But i always wonder and ask myself one question repeatedly – “Why do i need to download an app?” I hope this changes soon.

By: Michael Brill

Michael Brill — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 01:40:00 +0000

Ha… I was working on a slide titled “Mobile’s Netscape Moment” when I got this feed. i don’t think inter-app communication is going to move the needle for mobile utility. There’s already basic text and image sharing on iOS and the intents system on Android… but wasn’t the web something much, much bigger? Through a single interface, we could dynamically access information and application content in small bites without having to install a bunch of apps… and there really wouldn’t even be apps for what the web provided anyway.

In a mobile context, we don’t have time/space to search, browse and follow hyperlinks around. We want our devices to tell us what we need to know, get our input, and then move on. No matter how good inter-app communications are, there aren’t enough hours in the day for humans to coordinate all of the apps and mobile websites necessary for us to make good decisions. Think about $16 trillion in a global retail economy and how many of those transactions were based on the “best” decision? I reckon very few – I make crappy decisions every single day because I can’t possibly justify hours of poking around my phone to figure it all out.

That’s why I think mobile’s 1993 is going to look a lot more like Google Now than Mosaic.

By: johnbattelle

johnbattelle — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 17:26:00 +0000

Yes, OS/2 was a great OS, it never got traction though. And Unix did it too. Not exactly a consumer facing winner though.

By: Bob Sutterfield

Bob Sutterfield — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:01:00 +0000

See also The X Window System from 1984, and the much more elegant but commercially unsuccessful DeW (which became Sun’s SunDeW and then NeWS) from 1985. They’re window (UI) management systems based on preemptive multitasking, which the underlying OS provided since its inception in 1969.

And which the Android OS has provided since its inception as well.

By: drewc

drewc — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 06:39:00 +0000

From Wikipedia: OS/2, first released to developers in 1987, always supported preemptive multitasking and multithreading of native applications and a single “DOS box”. Version 2.0 and OS/2 Warp, IBM’s rewrite of OS/2 targeted at 386 systems, also permitted several different Windows sessions to be multitasked preemptively.