Future Of The Mobile Platform
So, this year is a promising one for mobile platforms with existing and new vendors entering the market. Is that a good thing or a bad thing, we are yet to find out!
It all started with the explosion of iPhone devices along with their iOS platform, which promised a consistent user experience and good performance. There was also BlackBerry from Research in Motion (RIM) which is kind of struggling for status in my own humble opinion. Then came Android from Google, with its host of hardware vendors adopting the OS and among the final notable entries was Microsoft with the announcement of the Windows Phone in partnership with other hardware vendors as well.
This year (And I have a feeling that it is gonna continue in the years to come) many new companies and initiatives are finding their way to the market, each hoping for gaining some grounds and snatching some of the pie that the aforementioned companies hog for themselves!
We've got Ubuntu OS the desktop operating system maker delivering an interesting new Mobile OS, there is also Mozilla the company behind the FireFox open source web browser and plenty of others such as Jolla with their Sailfish OS and Tizen from The Linux Foundation.
Observing all those platforms you will notice the level of creativity and some times the lack of it, each providing solutions to problems in existing ones or trying to tackle the mobile from a different angle. But that is not the point I am trying to make here.
In a time and age where the national agenda of most countries aims at investing more in technology, Software Engineering graduates will hit record numbers, add to that the creative atmosphere around the world with young talents and entrepreneurs trying to create and disrupt existing practices and technologies. Moreover there's the effect of the global financial difficulties which highly diverted the interest from huge corporations with huge budgets towards small, fast and lean startups that just might survive with little and aim at growing big.
Now, those new engineers will be hungry for exploring new ideas, markets and technologies. So, it won't harm to have so many choices and alternatives in terms of tools and platforms, of course given that those new platforms get accepted enough in the market to sustain and generate demand.
In the end it will always be of great benefit for the consumers having lots of choices and competing platforms aiming at creating the best experience. What makes this worthwhile is the social platform currently existing in which users will host their contacts in the form of friends, connections and so on and there's also the cloud storage solutions provided for massively hosting all sorts of files in the cloud.
All this was never going to be possible a couple of years back. See if you look at the big picture, the web with its amazing solutions is driving us towards more convergence, offloading platform vendors from re-inventing the wheel in certain aspects of the conventional operating system that have been already efficiently covered.
We are yet to see more amazing things happen, some will fail but others are sure to succeed, amaze and benefit all of us!
For the mean time I enjoy Android, I'm also highly interested in Ubuntu Mobile! What's the platform you are interested in as a consumer and as a software engineer?
It all started with the explosion of iPhone devices along with their iOS platform, which promised a consistent user experience and good performance. There was also BlackBerry from Research in Motion (RIM) which is kind of struggling for status in my own humble opinion. Then came Android from Google, with its host of hardware vendors adopting the OS and among the final notable entries was Microsoft with the announcement of the Windows Phone in partnership with other hardware vendors as well.
This year (And I have a feeling that it is gonna continue in the years to come) many new companies and initiatives are finding their way to the market, each hoping for gaining some grounds and snatching some of the pie that the aforementioned companies hog for themselves!
We've got Ubuntu OS the desktop operating system maker delivering an interesting new Mobile OS, there is also Mozilla the company behind the FireFox open source web browser and plenty of others such as Jolla with their Sailfish OS and Tizen from The Linux Foundation.
Observing all those platforms you will notice the level of creativity and some times the lack of it, each providing solutions to problems in existing ones or trying to tackle the mobile from a different angle. But that is not the point I am trying to make here.
In a time and age where the national agenda of most countries aims at investing more in technology, Software Engineering graduates will hit record numbers, add to that the creative atmosphere around the world with young talents and entrepreneurs trying to create and disrupt existing practices and technologies. Moreover there's the effect of the global financial difficulties which highly diverted the interest from huge corporations with huge budgets towards small, fast and lean startups that just might survive with little and aim at growing big.
Now, those new engineers will be hungry for exploring new ideas, markets and technologies. So, it won't harm to have so many choices and alternatives in terms of tools and platforms, of course given that those new platforms get accepted enough in the market to sustain and generate demand.
In the end it will always be of great benefit for the consumers having lots of choices and competing platforms aiming at creating the best experience. What makes this worthwhile is the social platform currently existing in which users will host their contacts in the form of friends, connections and so on and there's also the cloud storage solutions provided for massively hosting all sorts of files in the cloud.
All this was never going to be possible a couple of years back. See if you look at the big picture, the web with its amazing solutions is driving us towards more convergence, offloading platform vendors from re-inventing the wheel in certain aspects of the conventional operating system that have been already efficiently covered.
We are yet to see more amazing things happen, some will fail but others are sure to succeed, amaze and benefit all of us!
For the mean time I enjoy Android, I'm also highly interested in Ubuntu Mobile! What's the platform you are interested in as a consumer and as a software engineer?
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