James Whittaker is pissed off, really pissed off. We are held hostage by our browser and we should not stand for it.
That’s how he opens his talk on his vision for the future. I stumbled across this again the other week, when I came across this post, where he also goes over some tips for stage presence.
Really quickly let’s go over these as they are super handy. There are 5 (well really 4.5) bullet points of about stage presence worth keeping in mind:
- Come out swinging
- Attention span interlude
- Know your shit
- Make it epic
- Be brief, be right, be gone
He gives regular sessions on campus about Stage presence and I was able to watch one of the recordings and thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend watching it, if you get the chance.
This post is not about stage presence though, rather his view of the future. It does provide a nice lead in though :). Reading that post reminded me that I saw James Whittaker give a talk in person at our office on this topic, and he certainly came out swinging and kept on swinging for the whole duration. Below is a link to a similar talk he did:
For the most part I enjoyed his talk about his vision of the future. The jist was that we shouldn’t have to go to the web to the find (to hunt) the information we are after. We shouldn’t need to context switch. We don’t need apps to do that either (to gather). Our tools should be context aware and fetch the information for us (to farm). His example centered around going to a concert with his daughter after having received an email from her, asking him go with her to see Of Monsters and Men (loved that album and thanks for putting me on to them ;)).
His tools, in this case Outlook, should be context aware and be smart enough to fetch maps/travel directions/suggestions for restaurants and book the tickets. He bemoans the context switch out of whatever tool you are in to open a browser or an App to complete those tasks. He firmly(?) believes that Microsoft is one of the few companies that is in a position to deliver on this proposition based on the tools and services they offer. These tools are ‘Super apps’! Things like Outlook + ‘Bing knows’
While I agree with the premise, at the time I came away from the talk feeling another walled garden in the making. Rather than building open APIs and services it felt heavily slanted to being embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem. Despite mentioning Twitter and Facebook as well (and does talk tongue in cheek about ‘this is branding’ when referring to the XBox and Surface), I couldn’t shake that feeling. For what it’s worth I have similar sentiments towwards Apple… but they do make lovely products…
I believe that in order for companies (particularly Microsoft) to remain relevant, they need to be more open and allow tools from all sources to build on these systems simply and efficiently. Innovation seems to happen more frequently and rapidly outside of large bureaucratic companies and while they have the resources to deliver, they are slow to do so. Just in case you didn’t realise, I work at Skype, at least for now.
The web was built on openness and I find it quite tragic that more and more we are seeing tiered service provisioning, vendor lock in and data lock in. Yes, yes, companies need to make money, I am not that naive, but there are surely better ways.
I don’t think we should be locked into a world where the only way achieve this vision is with my Windows Phone (or iPhone for that matter), i.e. one ecosystem. Maybe I am the odd one out, at work I have a Windows machine, my phone is an Android device, my home setup is a Mac+iPad. Building so called ‘Super apps’ for all platforms is a big ask. And therein lies the crux of the matter… All of these devices already have a ‘Super App’ in common: the browser! We have had it for decades! Yes it was a pain to build for all of the different makes and versions; and while there are still problems, the last 3 or so years have seen an incredible convergence in supported features and functionality.
We might have afforded the browser an ‘incredible’ amount of power, I use it for almost everything. I don’t mind using apps; however my context switch happens when I need to leave the browser to use Outlook for example. I would argue that we need to invest more into making our ‘web apps’ better (services, uis, browsers). Turn these web apps into ‘Super apps’ that leverage the Ueber App that is the venerable browser, so that I don’t need to have Outlook or something else open to get what I need. Rather than invest in a walled garden of comfort that is proprietary and closed. It should run on any device, anywhere I am connected and that is the browser! All hail the Ueber app home of the super apps.