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Steve Jobs Missed the Mobile Web - Bill Gates Missed the Web

Monday, July 21, 2008

When the web was still in it’s infancy Microsoft and Netscape both strayed away from following an open set of standards in hopes of securing their foothold. Microsoft and Netscape wrote proprietary JavaScript and JScript rescpectively, both companies rendered HTML and CSS loosely and neither browser manufacturer seemed to have much regard for giving the developers, the pioneers of the web space, a path to follow. This lead to tacky grey buttons that read “This website is best viewed in IE on Windows” or “Optimized for Netscape Communicator”. 

It wasn’t until the W3C called in the big guns and created a standards coalition that we began to have websites that rendered properly in more than one browser. The transition certainly wasn’t a smooth one and probably created more forks than it did band aids. Developers were forced to use browser detection and create compliant sites (to show that they could) in addition to browser specific sites, to accommodate for the millions of internet users still using archaic browsers.

Modern browsers like FF2+, IE7+ and Opera 9+ are closer to spec while still remaining backwards compatible. Code hacks, and browser detection can be left behind of the most part, aside from a few IE Conditional comments and such.  It has been over 15 years since the first browser was created and we are just now starting to settle on standards that have been in place (albeit evolving) since the beginning. 

Commercial interest in pwning the web created this mess, and you would think we would’ve learned something from it. 

Steve Jobs, the do-no-evil savior behind Apple revolutionized music by introducing the iPod. The iPod was (and still is) more than just a way to store, transport and listen to music on the go, it’s a fashion icon. The white earbuds, the smaller the sleek design and soft curves, the innovative wheel dial… it worked and it worked in a big way.

Steve Jobs last big hoorah of his career is undoubtedly the iphone. Unless you want to count the macbook air, which is neat, but not certainly not an icon. 3G iPhones are near impossible to get a hold of and their second hand market prices are ridiculously inflated, just as the first gen device was when it was released.  When the iPhone was announced Apple’s stock was at around $85.00 a share, it’s tripled and come back to a double. Apple is a hot commodity right now and they are quickly gaining market share. 

Apple’s success has not come without it’s pitfalls.  The iPhone, which is opening up the mobile web in fad fashion, the way the iPod did music has it’s flaws. There was a lot of controversy over the delayed release of a Developers Kit for the iPhone. I wont get into that controversy, the bottom line is, the iPhone does require specific, proprietary code to develop applications on their platform. Yes you can view the NY Times on the 3” screen, but any iPhone user will tell you that doing so is a lesson in futility. iPhone specific websites are popping up as big name companies push for an entrance into the new platform and therein lies the rub.

Are you going to need a Treo Site, a Voyager Site, a Razr Site and iPhone site to reach the .mobi community? Well, maybe not… developers are resorting back to their old ways and implementing browser sniffing and platform sniffing redirects (read code forking) only this time it’s worse. There is more to account for on a mobile site, structure and navigation on a mobile platform is often radically different from a usability standpoint. In other words, developers are forced to create entirely new sites, not just entirely new pages. You can’t blame this all on Steve Jobs, he just brought a product to market to fill a need. However, he didn’t make it easy for competing browser manufacturers to create a mobile browser on his device. Don’t expect firefox on the iPhone any time soon, in fact John Lilly, the CEO of Mozilla openly states that Mozilla has no intentions of creating a browser for the iPhone because Apple intentionally makes it difficult to do so. They don’t want outsiders to disrupt the user experience.

The resolution of the iPhone’s native resolution is 320 X 240, which consequentially is exactly half that of the computers that were capable of when the web was born (640 X 480). The iPhone doesn’t need a web browser, mobile devices for that matter, really have no NEED for a web browser. Dot Mobis and the introduction of mobile specific “web sites” give us an opportunity to rethink the purpose of the platform. What should this device do, how can it do it effectively and how can we develop a set of standards to allow this venture to grow into an economy of scale? We have to stop forcing the square peg into the round hole.

What should your iPhone do for you?

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