by Diane Tate

The Future of Mobile is the Web

I had a fun chance to share my thoughts on mobile and the web with my friends at Metavallon.

Enjoy!

The world is going mobile. Of course, this shouldn’t be news to anyone remotely dialed in (to use an anachronistic term) to the developments of the Internet. In case you wanted to picture exactly how this is transpiring, here’s some big picture context:

  • Clear scenarios from developing countries using mobile far differently than we do in developed countries.
  • Very juicy global stats collected by Mozilla evangelist Robert Nyman.
  • And Robert drawing heavily from our market research partner VisionMobile – definitely check out their very handy reports (App Annie also rocks in this area).

    • As you start to immerse yourself in the world of mobile, you’ll notice a conflation between “web” and “apps.” Here’s a stark example:

    Note that this search is related to learning, so this likely represents either aspiring developers or – as the ensuing Twitter discussion elucidates – economic opportunists as opposed to technologists.

    If you are an economic opportunist, be sure to read the VisionMobile Q3 2014 Developer Economics report, and take two aspirins. Yet despite the bleak outlook for economic payoff from apps, many portend the death of the web on mobile.

    Now counter this with the fact that the pendulum from some (the?) significant players shows a swing back to becoming more “webby”:

  • Facebook introduced App Links (‘app-to-app linking’) this April.
  • Google is broadening the reach of its Android apps, supporting them running on Chrome.
  • Apple is making HTML5 friendlier than ever on the iPhone.

    • Why the shift?

    Among the strong voices is Benedict Evans, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz who has written extensively about the value of proprietary mobile ecosystems Evans concedes that apps are by necessity becoming more weblike. The reason is that the mobile app ecosystem lacks two things the web has:

  • You can link to any resource.
  • That resource will be there i.e. you don’t need to install anything.

    • Those two statements highlight that at its essence, the web is cross-platform and device-agnostic. That’s not true for mobile. Check out slide 8 of Robert’s deck. For mobile, device fragmentation has serious consequences for building, testing and deploying (let alone partnering) anything.

    At Mozilla we know the web wins on both merit and precedent, but it’s being threatened by mobile right now. So Mozilla is building the web in today’s world, and driving towards a future where we defend the web from threats of closed app stores and protocols and return it to the hands of developers who can link and publish to anything, anywhere.

    We’d love for you to join us!

    by Diane Tate

    Humans aren’t rational – and that’s ok

    The latest episode in the fierce drama unfolding between ride-renting services Lyft and Uber is certainly distasteful. It’s also puzzling. As my friend Rogo pointed out:

    “Uber can’t be killed by Lyft given its far superior resources. And it makes no sense for Uber to actually try to finish off its smaller competitor”

    …due to the regulatory battle which they share an interest in fighting together.

    I am sure the Travis worshippers credit some insanely brilliant strategic design to this behavior and I look forward to learning what it is if it can help us see a picture more noble than the sleaze that has been exposed thus far. Barring that, I’ll defer to what many say is the source of such conscienceless, greed-absolving behavior: yes, that scourge known as “Objectivism.”

    The irony is that for as much as this ideology professes rationality, it is basically a pretense to cloak and justify the basest of human selfishness. Even Rand herself inadvertently exposed how conflicted this pure-rationality paradigm is (when a lover rebuffed her advances – what, love in the realm of the rational? – she later dismissed his “ugly actions and irrational behavior in his private life”).

    In today’s iteration of this immature, unsophisticated world view, greed and hubris appear to be compelling a CEO to behaviors that (ironically) just aren’t rational. This is all in the name of ‘winning’ and encouraged at any cost when there is a one-dimensional focus on monetary returns that ignores the complexities of legal and human frameworks that underpin any economic activity.

    If this were merely a warped personal philosophy, I could move on. But it’s had (and sadly as we’ve seen this week, continues to have) too much impact for me to ignore.

     

    by Diane Tate

    Congruence

    This week I had the opportunity to help out the inimitable Dave Nugent and his conspirators Brian and Taylor with their first-ever ForwardJS conference. It felt great because:

    (1) It aligns perfectly with what Mozilla is all about

    (2) Mozilla could support the conference directly by offering a room for a “JavaScript Clarity” class and of course, lanyards!

    (3) I could share about all kinds of ways people can contribute to the web at Mozilla with zero sense of opportunism, because contributing to Mozilla *is* contributing to the web.

    Super glad Dave & Co are continuing the ForwardJS charge next February 4. And if you’re curious about what I shared, you can see the specifics below: