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I have a friend who was an accountant, found that he liked writing VBA scripts in Excel, and eventually wound up at a company big enough to need an IT departmen
by ArbitraryLimits 15y ago
I have a friend who was an accountant, found that he liked writing VBA scripts in Excel, and eventually wound up at a company big enough to need an IT department but small enough not to afford a big one, and now he's basically got a dual CFO/CIO role. Every six months or so he tells me about the new mobile app he's got in development for the salesmen to place orders, or for manufacturing line inspectors to check inventory, or something. I always point out that it would be cheaper, faster, and more general to just build a wep application, and he always rolls his eyes and tells me I don't understand the marketing power of mobile apps.
Which is true, I don't. But it got me thinking about all the "browser is the new OS" and "the Internet is OS-agnostic" and "this is the end of Microsoft" talk from the late 90s. Anyone else remember those days? Because Steve Jobs and the IPhone pretty much undid it all. It's 15 years later and everyone cares about the OS again. Weird.
- Legion 15y ago> Because Steve Jobs and the IPhone pretty much undid it all. It's funny that you pin it on Jobs, who didn't want apps in the first place. Indeed, in 2007, Apple was telling developers to make web apps - http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-Third-Party-Web-2-0-Applications.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-... It was user demand that drove the creation of third party native app development.
- wmf 15y agoJobs didn't want apps or Jobs said he didn't want apps? If the native SDK wasn't ready yet, I would have been promoting Web apps, too.
- Joeri 15y agoHe really didn't want apps: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/blogs/press-here/Steve-Jobs-Didnt-Want-Apps-on-the-iPhone-in-the-Beginning-132334378.html http://www.nbclosangeles.com/blogs/press-here/Steve-Jobs-Did...
- WayneDB 15y agoGiven Apple's counter-intelligence tactics...you still don't know that. Just like we don't know whether those iPhones were actually "lost" in a bar...both times.
- cpeterso 15y agoDid Apple write any of the iPhone 1.0's system apps as non-native web apps?
- wmf 15y agoIIRC Jobs specifically mentioned that the built-in apps couldn't have been built to the same quality if they were Web apps. But then he told developers to write Web apps. So either he had a "native for us, Web for you" policy or he was just stalling until the App Store was ready. I'm inclined to take him at his word, but considering RDF we may never know for sure.
- sopooneo 15y agoAt the time that he said that, did Jobs indicate that web apps on iOS would ever be given hooks into the accelerometers, or GPS, or mic? Because if not, what would the point be?
- Joeri 15y agoOr door #3: steve jobs thought 3rd party apps would do more to ruin the experience than to improve it, and all-in-all users were better off without them. Given his control freak tendencies, I'm inclined to believe that last option.
- ZenPsycho 15y agoI remember reading somewhere that they /did/ try to build some of the iphone 1.0 apps as something akin to dashboard widgets and found that the hardware just wasn't quite up to the task, and they were forced to build them as native apps for performance reasons. This says to me that ideologically, they were convinced that the osx dashboard widget method of development was the way to go, but the reality of mobile hardware, combined with their even stronger ideology of responsive user experience made them go native.