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Kickstarter, Pinterest, and Airbnb are interesting counterexamples to the mobile first thinking. They are three of the biggest success stories of the last few y

Kickstarter, Pinterest, and Airbnb are interesting counterexamples to the mobile first thinking. They are three of the biggest success stories of the last few years. Two have solid business models and seem to be scaling well. Pinterest at least has a path to one via affiliate fees. Of the three KS doesn't have an app. Pinterest's breaks a lot of the key functionality and makes it basically read only. Airbnb has done a really good job considering the mobile vs. desktop uses cases and designing appropriately. Mobile is unquestionably the future, but it's a little surprising that there hasn't been a huge, non-game, break away money maker. As cool as Instagram was, it felt like a bit of a panic acquisition. Maybe we have to wait for Square to exit to see the first big proof.

Silhouette 14y ago
Mobile is unquestionably the future, but it's a little surprising that there hasn't been a huge, non-game, break away money maker. Mobile devices are surely the future for personal information retrieval and a lot of social interactions, which collectively makes up a huge part of the consumer market. Mobile apps, I am much more sceptical about. For one thing, web apps and cloud buzzwords took hold partly because it was so much hassle to deploy and maintain traditional native apps on the desktop. I don't see any reason the same arguments won't hold for mobile over the long run. For another thing, you have to consider the nature of the markets. Winning big in web app world, where there is real money to be made in B2B, is being Salesforce. Winning big in platform/channel world, where you're not just hitting consumers but rather every interaction between consumers and other consumers or businesses, is being Google or Facebook or Amazon or Steam or PayPal. Winning big in mobile app world, where users look at a $1.50 app that's going to save them 10 minutes a day and wonder if it's too expensive, is... maybe enough to pay the rent?

Silhouette 14y ago

Mobile is unquestionably the future, but it's a little surprising that there hasn't been a huge, non-game, break away money maker. Mobile devices are surely the future for personal information retrieval and a lot of social interactions, which collectively makes up a huge part of the consumer market. Mobile apps, I am much more sceptical about. For one thing, web apps and cloud buzzwords took hold partly because it was so much hassle to deploy and maintain traditional native apps on the desktop. I don't see any reason the same arguments won't hold for mobile over the long run. For another thing, you have to consider the nature of the markets. Winning big in web app world, where there is real money to be made in B2B, is being Salesforce. Winning big in platform/channel world, where you're not just hitting consumers but rather every interaction between consumers and other consumers or businesses, is being Google or Facebook or Amazon or Steam or PayPal. Winning big in mobile app world, where users look at a $1.50 app that's going to save them 10 minutes a day and wonder if it's too expensive, is... maybe enough to pay the rent?