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Microsoft's Ray Ozzie: "Apps Don’t Make Your Phone Special"

6 points by Flemlord 17y ago

newsio 17y ago
Some people who claim to have been at the talk said that Ozzie's opinions were more nuanced than what's been reported on Gizmodo and VentureBeat. Check the comments at the bottom of Scoble's blog post: http://scobleizer.com/2009/11/17/ray-ozzie-is-wrong-about-smartphone-apps/ http://scobleizer.com/2009/11/17/ray-ozzie-is-wrong-about-sm... Wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft or Ozzie issues a clarification about this.
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  From those comments: The real battle is not between RIM, Android, iPhone, WinMob, Nokia - it's really between Flash, HTML5+, JavaFX and Silverlight summed it up for me.
vaksel 17y ago
Apple would probably disagree
- sjs 17y ago
  They might now but the iPhone didn't need apps to start selling.
protomyth 17y ago
"Mobile apps require very little development, so it's much easier to bring them onto every platform." is a fairly insulting statement. Mobile apps have serious resource limits and new input methods that require some real UI testing and planning. Porting is also going to be an issue. The platforms have very different capabilities and conventions.
- omouse 17y ago
  Mobile apps have serious resource limits Aahahah, that's funny. Smart phones are as powerful as the box I used to play Tribes and Wipeout on. They have more than enough resources to do things.
  - protomyth 17y ago
    Well, I used to program the Atari 400, but people expect a little more these days. I'll bet the machine you played Tribes and Wipeout on had a larger screen than an iPhone. Compared to what more programmers experience on the desktops, the current crop of smart phones requires resource management in terms of CPU, memory, storage, and screen real estate.
  - antonovka 17y ago
    People are used to more, and we need to do it with less time. They don't want to wait for loading screens, they want to load their smoothly scrolling images over the WiFi on-demand from Flickr while performing high quality interpolation to produce the thumbnails. They want to rotate the device to CoverFlow, and we'll have to load all those images as GL textures and pay the CPU hit for rendering the text labels as they rapidly scroll through their caturday pictures, all the while downloading and caching images in the background to provide a seamless and smooth user experience. I can't add loading screens (so I have time to preload/pre-render), or restrict my data accesses to loading to optimized textures I have on disk, or spend months (years?) working on optimizing out every CPU cycle. That's not what people want. So yes, for the things people expect from our applications, we're up against serious resource limits.

6 points by Flemlord 17y ago

Some people who claim to have been at the talk said that Ozzie's opinions were more nuanced than what's been reported on Gizmodo and VentureBeat. Check the comments at the bottom of Scoble's blog post: http://scobleizer.com/2009/11/17/ray-ozzie-is-wrong-about-smartphone-apps/ http://scobleizer.com/2009/11/17/ray-ozzie-is-wrong-about-sm... Wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft or Ozzie issues a clarification about this.

anigbrowl 17y ago
From those comments: The real battle is not between RIM, Android, iPhone, WinMob, Nokia - it's really between Flash, HTML5+, JavaFX and Silverlight summed it up for me.

vaksel 17y ago

Apple would probably disagree

sjs 17y ago
They might now but the iPhone didn't need apps to start selling.

protomyth 17y ago

"Mobile apps require very little development, so it's much easier to bring them onto every platform." is a fairly insulting statement. Mobile apps have serious resource limits and new input methods that require some real UI testing and planning. Porting is also going to be an issue. The platforms have very different capabilities and conventions.

omouse 17y ago
Mobile apps have serious resource limits Aahahah, that's funny. Smart phones are as powerful as the box I used to play Tribes and Wipeout on. They have more than enough resources to do things.
- protomyth 17y ago
  Well, I used to program the Atari 400, but people expect a little more these days. I'll bet the machine you played Tribes and Wipeout on had a larger screen than an iPhone. Compared to what more programmers experience on the desktops, the current crop of smart phones requires resource management in terms of CPU, memory, storage, and screen real estate.
- antonovka 17y ago
  People are used to more, and we need to do it with less time. They don't want to wait for loading screens, they want to load their smoothly scrolling images over the WiFi on-demand from Flickr while performing high quality interpolation to produce the thumbnails. They want to rotate the device to CoverFlow, and we'll have to load all those images as GL textures and pay the CPU hit for rendering the text labels as they rapidly scroll through their caturday pictures, all the while downloading and caching images in the background to provide a seamless and smooth user experience. I can't add loading screens (so I have time to preload/pre-render), or restrict my data accesses to loading to optimized textures I have on disk, or spend months (years?) working on optimizing out every CPU cycle. That's not what people want. So yes, for the things people expect from our applications, we're up against serious resource limits.