On Saturday, 20 June 2015 at 19:00:08 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Pretty soon it won't. :) There are an estimated 2.5 billion
smartphone users:
http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/07/postmodern-computing/
The highest estimates of desktop and laptop users I've seen
don't crack 2 billion. That means desktops are already a
minority platform.
Do you think it's wise to ignore 2 billion users? The size of the
mobile market doesn't mean you can target it entirely. The
article suggests currently we have era of services and services
are clustered by culture, which means you can't target users
outside of your cultural cluster, while desktop applications
usually target entire desktop market without exceptions.
All the major mobile vendors are working on multi-window
implementations which will soon allow you to plug your mobile
device into a dock that connects to a monitor/keyboard/trackpad
on your desk and run your mobile apps in a similar way to the
desktop: Apple's just-announced multi-window feature to go
along with their coming iPad Pro, Google's in-development
multi-window implementation that has been found in the Android
M build, and Microsoft's recently announced Continuum for
mobile devices, that lets you plug your Windows Phone into a
monitor and use Office with a desktop UI.
Are you going to support windows phone?
What this means is that people will soon be using their mobile
devices for almost everything and desktop computers are
effectively dead. :) Now, workstations were killed off by PCs
and they still sell a couple million worldwide. Similarly,
there will always be a niche for PCs and mainframes. It's just
a small niche.
It will be desktop for all practical purposes, just more
constrained in resources. Mobile platform will embrace two
unrelated ecosystems, and you will still have to choose which
ecosystem you target, and since desktop is a minority, why you
would care about mobile desktop? It will be minority for all the
same reasons that make desktop minority.
