Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

Rich Miner (previously at Google, now with Google Ventures) thinks so, for there to be profit. FierceDeveloper has written some commentary on this, favoring smartphones.

Rich:

• “A business can empower a workforce by giving them a mobile data management cloud. The whole handset could become the workflow for an entire company. The real opportunity is the enterprise.”
• “The good news for mobile developers is that iPhone, Android and Nokia 60 all have the same HTML-based browsers to build dynamic apps.”

Considering he’s working for Google, it’s not surprising he thinks the browser is the “window” to the information and the services instead of downloaded applications, despite the fact that it’s still impossible to access many phone features from the browser. Many applications work though fine via a browser, like time and status reporting, and they are likely to be quicker to adopt (nothing to install etc) and compatible with a lot more phones that way.

As I’ve mentioned before, you don’t need a smartphone for corporate access, even though it clearly and obviously improves the user experience. The question is though how many want to take the expense of giving all workers new phones, especially when the workers have their own phones.

There’s also the question of “point of attack”: It’s a rule of thumb not to address the IT department, but rather management and generally those that need mobile access to corporate information. Provide the services in the cloud, so there’s no need for buying new servers and other things that will make the IT manager lose his lunch and sleep.

FierceDeveloper - An enterprising future for mobile app development?

Posted by Anders Borg 19:55 | Permalink