On Monday, 6 November 2017 at 08:33:16 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Also, nobody saw mobile growing so gigantic, so fast, not even Jobs by all indications. Mobile has really been a tidal wave over the last decade. Funny how all you hear is bitching and whining from a bunch of devs on proggit/HN about how they missed the '80s PC boom or '90s dot.com boom and there's nothing fundamentally exciting like that now, all while the biggest boom of them all, the mobile boom, just grew and grew right in front of their faces. :D
Well, I was there in the early nineties when the Microsoft WinPad was being talked about. This was almost 20 years before the iPad came out. I remember going through the 90's with Window CE interations, which eventually evolved into Window Mobile 2003 - which is when I purchased my first 'smart phone', and learnt how to write apps for it ( actually my current phone still runs Windows Mobile 6.1 ;-).
I tried getting people around me interested in mobile devices, including the business I worked in. Nobody was really interested. They were all happy with their little push button nokias.
Microsoft had the vision though, and they had it earlier than perhaps anyone else. But the vision was too far ahead of its time, and, around the early 2000's they refused to lose any more money, put it on the back burner, and competitors came in a took over - at a time when 'consumers' were just beginning to share the vision too....
But I think what really made it take off so fast and unexpectadly, was the convergence of mobile devices, mobile communication technology (i.e wifi, gps and stuff), and of course the internet... as well as the ability to find cheap labour overseas to build the produces on mass.
I doubt anyone could have envisioned that convergence...but some companies were in a better position (more agile) than others, at the time, to capitalise on it.
But the vision of being mobile was certainly there, back in the early nineties - and Microsoft were leading it.
