LinkedIn
Choosing a Smart Mobile Platform for the Enterprise Strategy
If you’re starting down the path of creating a mobility strategy for your business, read over this post first. The B2B environment has a lot more Blackberry phones than, say, iPhones. If you’re working on delivering a series of unique services to consumers via the Internet, you have to deal with iPhones, Blackberrys, Androids, Windows 7, and maybe even the Symbian platform. If you step back for a moment and think about this, you have to have a development team for each platform. You also need to factor in the tradeoffs between creating, evolving and maintaining a native app versus a browser app.
“A Guide to Determine the Right Smart Mobile Platform(s) for Your Enterprise Strategy” is a useful article to get yourself oriented with the basic issues and tradeoffs you’ll be facing. You’ll also want to consider “Native Mobile App or Mobile Web App?” for the native versus browser tradeoffs.
If you were around in the late 1980s, you’ll recall something strangely similar to these dilemmas and tradeoffs where devices have very little compatibility between them. We had a new device then, called the PC – the personal computer. You probably remember the different versions of DOS and what a pain it was to get anything to run well, much less move the software you bought to another machine. Different versions of the same software, like word processing and spreadsheet programs, had to be recoded for the different PC manufacturers. I remember staring at software boxes, wondering if the software I wanted would run on my particular PC or not. What a pain.
Have patience. In time the mobile market will mature and there will be some convergence in the platforms. However, for now you need to carefully review the tradeoffs and look for people who have been down this path before. I know from developing that one iPhone app for BMC Software that the design process for an iPhone is very different than for desktop computers, and I needed more help than I was willing to admit at first.
If you find any other great sources for solutions to these challenges, let me know.
Tom
(Disclosure: Tom Parish Inc. has a business relationship with Techendeavour.com, who wrote the articles mentioned here. Other business affiliations include Twistage.com for video platform management and BMC Software.)
© 2010 Tom Parish Inc. All rights reserved.
Choosing a Smart Mobile Platform for the Enterprise Strategy