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Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie: Apps don’t make your phone special
[Quote:]
Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie weighed in at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference today on the battle between different smartphone platforms including Windows Mobile. It’s not the applications available on the various platforms that will be the differentiators, Ozzie said, even though that’s what many companies and writers seem to focus on.“All the apps that count will be ported to every one of them,” he said. It’s a completely different situation from the PC market, where software’s built to run on a Windows or a Mac, he said. Mobile apps require very little development, so it’s much easier to bring them onto every platform
As an iPhone developer, of course I’ve looked at Blackberry, Android and Windows Mobile development. Ray Ozzie is talking utter and complete bullshit.
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Hi John,
I’m wondering if you had a look at palm’s WebOS. The SDK is still somewhat limited but its looking very promising, I’ve been playing around with a pre and I’ve been fairly impressed.
Only for about 5 minutes. WebOS market share is currently not big enough to consider it a viable platform for my stuff.
Do you mind if I ask what might seem like a silly question? One of the things that they tout on the Android platform is “widgets.” How are these different from iPhone apps? Or am I asking for an apples-to-oranges comparison?
no, not a silly question. App Widgets are miniature application views that can be embedded in other applications and receive periodic updates. These views are referred to as Widgets in the user interface, and you can publish one with an App Widget provider. An application component that is able to hold other App Widgets is called an App Widget host. One such Widget hosts is the Home screen, so it’s easy for the end-user to mistake a widget for a full application.
So, just for a vantage point, the Droid preview commercials that got very heavy airplay during the World Series, the majority of the “iDon’t” lines really don’t mean a whole lot to the average guy off the street, and one of them was “iDon’t run widgets…”
(At the end of the day, the only two lines from that commercial that actually have any demonstrable day-to-day significance are a flash camera and the ability to run multiple apps at once, as far as I was concerned. There’s something to be said for a removable battery but even before I bought a “smart phone” of any type, I never had more than one battery and the more important bit to me was keeping it charged…)