Thursday, February 27, 2014

The Mobile Evolution is different from the PC Revolution

When PCs entered the scene, it was a revolution. The entry of mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) is less revolution and more evolution.

What is the difference? Exclusive applications.

When PCs entered the market, they shared some applications with minicomputers and mainframes (assemblers, compilers, and text editors, mostly) but a large percentage of applications were unique to PCs. Word processors, spreadsheets, and games were the popular applications, and none of them were from mainframes.

Mobile applications, for the most part, are extensions of existing PC and web applications. Twitter, Facebook, even Google Maps all live on the web and in the mobile world.

There are some apps that are (or were) mobile-only. "Angry Birds" was first released for the iPhone and later moved to other platforms. FourSquare is a mobile-only app, given its "check in" function.

But the number of mobile-only apps is small, compared to the total. This is quite different from the PC revolution, which saw thousands of PC-specific applications and a small number of mainframe "crossover" applications.

The PC world was filled with new applications, and new types of applications. That's why it was a revolution. The mobile world -- so far -- is filled with extensions to web applications. That's why the mobile world is an evolution.

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