mmulligan | 9:51 am Jan 18, 2012

No Comments

Tweet

Share

The Platform’s the Thing

After years of wavering we finally upgraded the TV in our house recently. Setting it up I found myself thinking back to the job listings that were appearing just after I graduated college. One of the most common was “HTML programmer wanted”. This was the mid nineties here – HTML2, no scripting, limited browsers, hardly any graphical content. The idea that knowing how to add <b></b> to important text didn’t really seem like real programming.

The other hot job listing when my class graduated was “Java programmer wanted”. Now this was a real computer language like the ones at college (ironically Java was so new it wasn’t actually on our college syllabus). By 1999 Sun Microsystems introduced the Java Platform, which came in three flavours, J2SE, J2EE, and J2ME. Sun was by no means the first company to use the idea of a platform, but in J2ME they introduced the first mobile platform that would achieve widespread acceptance by the industry.
(Sidebar – At the J2ME launch at JavaOne, Sun used the Palm V as the reference device.  The Palm V was an elegant monoblock touch screen device with some buttons at the bottom. Sound familiar?)

Despite its success, J2ME has often been criticized as a fragmented platform. In a way it’s unsurprising; a platform by its nature should be a stable, evolve slowly and avoid differentiation. This is not the way to make your devices stand out from your competitor. J2ME was not the only mobile platform in the industry. It has also had competitors, most notably Symbian, Windows Phone and BREW. However, none of these platforms achieved the traction that J2ME had. Then, in 2008, Apple launched iOS 2 and Google launched Android and the mobile platform revolution began.

There are a lot of similarities between iOS and Android. Both platforms are quite powerful (relative to J2ME). Both platforms are closer to desktop development environments than previous mobile platforms (for example, Android development is on J2SE rather than J2ME). Both have an app store/market that provides an excellent distribution mechanism and more importantly a simple way to earn money from their apps. Despite their similarities there is a crucial difference between iOS and Android. iOS is developed as a single platform from a single vendor, while Android is open source and licenced to many hardware vendors. This means more choice, but again raised the issue of fragmentation. To avoid this, Google has enforced a very strict control of Android, leading many to question whether Android is open.

With the advent of iOS and Android, the general view was that the mobile industry was about to coalesce around these two platforms. It was thought that as the platforms matured they would progress from smartphones through to market entry devices. As this progression happened, so the view was, the other platforms in the market would get squeezed out.

But here’s the thing about the mobile industry, the status quo is a fleeting thing. Apple is very much focused on higher tiered devices with iOS as this fits with the brand values for iPhone. Android has been moving to lower tiers, but there are IP licensing requirements around Android that mean there is a bottom below which it is not profitable to produce an Android phone. Also, despite the tighter control, there are those who say that Android is fragmenting as it grows (though there are some who say this is differentiation, not fragmentation).

The rest of the mobile industry hasn’t been idle either. Microsoft revamped Windows Phone, producing a very credible platform for developers. Even more significant, Nokia has embraced Windows Phone at the expense of Symbian. This would have been unthinkable five years ago and is a seismic shift which I think will have big implications in 2012. RIM has also announced a new platform to replace their J2ME based BBOS. This new platform will be known as BB10 and is based on the QNX real-time operating system. Even the venerable J2ME is getting a new lease of life in emerging markets where devices typically retail in the $10-$15 range.

And this platform proliferation doesn’t end there, which leads me back to the TV that we recently got in our home. You see, our television is no longer just a TV, it’s a Smart TV Platform. And it’s not just Samsung, but LG, Sony and all the major TV manufacturers that have TV platforms. Beyond the TV, your car is becoming a platform with things like R-Link from Renault, Sync from Ford and QNX Car used in Audi, BMW and others. It seems that these days everything including the kitchen sink (or at least the washing machine) is a platform. From a developer perspective this can seem like a nightmare of fragmentation of OS, language, programming model and so on. But here’s the curious thing I noticed when setting up my TV – the TV and most of these platforms support HTML5, either exclusively or as an alternative to a native development environment. HTML5 does have it’s own fragmentation issues. But it certainly simplifies things. And I predict that once again we will see jobs listing pages filling up with “HTML programmer wanted”.