
Microsoft's Ray Ozzie: "Apps Don’t Make Your Phone Special" - Flemlord
http://gizmodo.com/5407068/microsofts-ray-ozzie-apps-dont-make-your-phone-special
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protomyth
"Mobile apps require very little development, so it's much easier to bring
them onto every platform." is a fairly insulting statement. Mobile apps have
serious resource limits and new input methods that require some real UI
testing and planning.

Porting is also going to be an issue. The platforms have very different
capabilities and conventions.

~~~
omouse
_Mobile apps have serious resource limits_

Aahahah, that's funny. Smart phones are as powerful as the box I used to play
Tribes and Wipeout on. They have more than enough resources to do things.

~~~
antonovka
People are used to more, and we need to do it with less time. They don't want
to wait for loading screens, they want to load their smoothly scrolling images
over the WiFi on-demand from Flickr while performing high quality
interpolation to produce the thumbnails.

They want to rotate the device to CoverFlow, and we'll have to load all those
images as GL textures and pay the CPU hit for rendering the text labels as
they rapidly scroll through their caturday pictures, all the while downloading
and caching images in the background to provide a seamless and smooth user
experience.

I can't add loading screens (so I have time to preload/pre-render), or
restrict my data accesses to loading to optimized textures I have on disk, or
spend months (years?) working on optimizing out every CPU cycle. That's not
what people want.

So yes, for the things people expect from our applications, we're up against
serious resource limits.

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newsio
Some people who claim to have been at the talk said that Ozzie's opinions were
more nuanced than what's been reported on Gizmodo and VentureBeat. Check the
comments at the bottom of Scoble's blog post:

[http://scobleizer.com/2009/11/17/ray-ozzie-is-wrong-about-
sm...](http://scobleizer.com/2009/11/17/ray-ozzie-is-wrong-about-smartphone-
apps/)

Wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft or Ozzie issues a clarification about this.

~~~
anigbrowl
From those comments: _The real battle is not between RIM, Android, iPhone,
WinMob, Nokia - it's really between Flash, HTML5+, JavaFX and Silverlight_
summed it up for me.

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vaksel
Apple would probably disagree

~~~
sjs
They might now but the iPhone didn't need apps to start selling.

