4 ms·

What Ballmer and others missed (or blithely ignored) was the user experience with the iPhone vs other devices back in 2007. I had used various PDAs and mobile

What Ballmer and others missed (or blithely ignored) was the user experience with the iPhone vs other devices back in 2007. I had used various PDAs and mobile phones that had Internet access (of a sort) back then. Generally speaking, they had very tiny screens, a poor or nonexistent touchscreen, grossly underpowered processors with insufficient RAM, a cut-down network stack, and a crappy "browser". The best pre-iPhone experience (that I experienced) was the Moto Q, running Windows CE, which actually had WiFi and a almost tolerable text browser. I won't even talk about WAP and WML and how well all that worked. Compare that to the debut iPhone. Much larger capacitive touchscreen, smooth scrolling, pinch zoom / expand and more. You went to regular desktop websites, and they just worked. Then you see all the effort put into the UI for the address book and other apps, and that all adds up to a user experience quite unlike anything else at the time. Revolutionary. A better experience than even the Windows CE handheld PDAs.

guessbest 4y ago
You are 100% correct. They probably all missed this because the executive class all used Blackberry's (Google executives and Microsoft executives) which is another "also ran" in the business. I agree with your point about mobile browsers. No one ever putting much of any effort into supporting fast rendering of html or javascript much less AJAX in the web browser applications and feature phones all used something other than HTML like WAP. The best a user could hope for was a phone with a fast web proxy that performed the rendering like Opera Mini. > Opera Software pioneered with its Small Screen Rendering (SSR) and Medium Screen Rendering (MSR) technology. The Opera web browser is able to reformat regular web pages for optimal fit on small screens and medium-sized (PDA) screens. It was also the first widely available mobile browser to support Ajax and the first mobile browser to pass ACID2 test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_browser Web hosting providers and content creators didn't put much effort in to creating an alternate internet using WAP and WML. It just never materialized as viable.
dwighttk 4y ago
>You went to regular desktop websites, and they just worked. Yeah I kinda wish fewer sites gave me the mobile version. I really hate the sites that give me the mobile version after I request the desktop version.

guessbest 4y ago

You are 100% correct. They probably all missed this because the executive class all used Blackberry's (Google executives and Microsoft executives) which is another "also ran" in the business. I agree with your point about mobile browsers. No one ever putting much of any effort into supporting fast rendering of html or javascript much less AJAX in the web browser applications and feature phones all used something other than HTML like WAP. The best a user could hope for was a phone with a fast web proxy that performed the rendering like Opera Mini. > Opera Software pioneered with its Small Screen Rendering (SSR) and Medium Screen Rendering (MSR) technology. The Opera web browser is able to reformat regular web pages for optimal fit on small screens and medium-sized (PDA) screens. It was also the first widely available mobile browser to support Ajax and the first mobile browser to pass ACID2 test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_browser Web hosting providers and content creators didn't put much effort in to creating an alternate internet using WAP and WML. It just never materialized as viable.

dwighttk 4y ago

>You went to regular desktop websites, and they just worked. Yeah I kinda wish fewer sites gave me the mobile version. I really hate the sites that give me the mobile version after I request the desktop version.