Who are the players to watch in the smartphone world? There are two obvious names: Apple and Google/Android. There's another one that you can't ignore and shouldn't count out: Microsoft. Then there's Mozilla.
Mozilla? The Firefox web browser folks? Yeah, them.
Tom Nolle has a post highlighting some initiatives around Firefox that, Tom argues, could be a real game-changer in the smartphone environment, with implications for the broader issue of the Internet as the one and only public network of the future.
Mozilla is planning to release a version of Firefox as an OS for mobile handsets that would essentially function as a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) thin-client platform, Tom reports. The result would be a smartphone that runs much more completely via the cloud than any other such device now on the market.
This not only could make the Mozilla smartphone less expensive, it could also change how apps work, and how they work together. Tom writes:
"Imagine an HTML5 web developer weaving some handset or tablet features together with a cloud-hosted set of tools that included whiteboard, meeting, video, voice, etc. The result would look like a UC app, and it could work not only on phones or tablets but also on Firefox browsers for desktops and laptops, providing that there was some way to mimic APIs that represented the ‘handset or tablet features....
"An open model like this could offer significant benefits to users. If apps can be developed and deployed like HTML5 web pages, it sure simplifies the process of tuning collaboration and productivity features to each worker's specific needs. In theory, it would open the door for developers to deploy productivity tools as cloud services that could then be composed into pretty screens by those HTML5 authors. It could also redefine the competition in the space, forcing the primary collaboration and UC vendors to open their features up as cloud-hosted services delivered through URLs.
"An open model like this could offer significant benefits to users. If apps can be developed and deployed like HTML5 web pages, it sure simplifies the process of tuning collaboration and productivity features to each worker's specific needs. In theory, it would open the door for developers to deploy productivity tools as cloud services that could then be composed into pretty screens by those HTML5 authors. It could also redefine the competition in the space, forcing the primary collaboration and UC vendors to open their features up as cloud-hosted services delivered through URLs.
Between this vision of cloud-based communications and the emergence of WebRTC as a standard for voice-enabling web browsers, we're seeing the next phase of that old familiar technology trend, convergence. Communications are converging within the interface that we used to call the Web browser, but which I'm convinced will increasingly be a real-time multimedia communications interface. Obviously this is a long-term trend and the need for single-purpose communications devices will remain, but clearly the Web is not just for static viewing of static web pages. Hasn't been for awhile, of course, but the trend will only accelerate. As we've seen from all the people complaining about NBC not streaming the Olympics, users already see the Web browser as a software TV. (And just to get this off my chest: Yeah, I agree, NBC is stupid and all, but c'mon, complainers—talk about your First World Problems....)
I don't know all of the implications for this trend, or how exactly it'll play out, but one thing everybody should be able to recognize is that it'll require some significant upgrades to the public Internet, if we're going to deliver this kind of dynamic service composition with real-time quality of service. That, in turn, brings up all the usual struggles over whether the service providers are going to be willing to take on that infrastructure upgrade absent a guarantee that they'll be something other than bit pushers. It may be this political/business challenge, rather than anything technical, that holds back progress in this area.
