Recently, after reading Forrester’s latest research on mobile engagement, I recalled a piece of research that Frank Gillett and I wrote back in February 2001 called “Net App Platforms Emerge”. Re-reading this relic made me realize something -- smart developers saw the challenges of mobile coming years before it was on everybody elses radar. The story was simple enough -- client/server developers couldn't transition to a web-centric world, but web developers were expensive and hard to find and retain, and wireless apps were on the horizon but people were anxious about adding wireless to an already complicated transition. Keep in mind that in 2001, HP iPaq and Palm were market leaders, WiFi was in its infancy with the WiFi Alliance less than two years old and the release of the Danger Hiptop, with its totally cool swivel-retracting keyboard, was the buzz at tech conferences. Frank and I decided to focus the rest of the research report on mobile issue. There were some great Forrester reports that helped us out including "Many Devices, One Consumer" (June 2000), "Mastering Mobile Site Design" (November 2000) and "Internet Middleware" (July 1999). If you've been around Forrester as a client or an employee for a long time, these titles should definitely ring a bell.
What amuses me about the Net App Platform report now is some of the crazy lingo that we used to describe a problem that was years away from mattering to anyone. Yet, at the same time, there were some nuggets of truth buried in there. Our analysis went like this: As users adopt a growing array of Internet-capable devices even web-centric apps will come up short so you must make apps available anytime, anywhere, offer business services through machine-to-machine interfaces and weave application components into new services. Alas, today's platforms can't deliver the next generation apps because they lock apps to the PC browser, have no links between content creation apps and traditional development tools and lack critical Internet interfaces such SOAP, UDDI and RosettaNet. "What's the answer?" we heard the world cry -- The Net App Platform. This platform supposedly did three things.
We finished our report with the bold prediction that vendors would build Net App Platforms by 2005. Potential leaders included BEA WebLogic/WebGain, IBM Websphere/VisualAge, Microsoft Windows/Visual Studio, Oracle 9iAS/Internet Developer and Sun iPlanet/Forte. Clearly, our vendor predictions were off the mark. The question I want to ask everyone here is this: Has the basic problem outlined in this dinosaur of a report been solved -- that is, that different users need different capabilities on different devices wherever and whenever they need it? Give examples of applications that you think best illustrate success.