Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie on Mobile Apps

Anthony Ha for VentureBeat:

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 different 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.

Stupid and wrong, but what else is he going to say? There’s nothing truthful or accurate he could say about mobile development that looks good for Microsoft. If I were at Microsoft, I’d say their best bet should be to start arguing that mobile web apps are the future of mobile development, rather than native apps. That might actually be true, and it actually gives them a chance — if they were either able to produce a WebKit-caliber mobile browser or willing simply to adopt WebKit themselves. A big if, but at least that’s possible.

★ Tuesday, 17 November 2009