The runtime platform wars have begun, just like I predicted in my rebuttal to Mr. Mace’s article:
“Microsoft with Silverlight on the Desktop and soon to be Silverlight on Mobile will be joining the already under utilized .Net Compact Framework on Windows Mobile devices. Adobe with AIR for the Desktop and soon Air for Mobile will join Flash Lite which is deployed on numerous platforms. Nokia purchased Trolltech to enable Qt on all their devices: S40, S60 and Maemo. The Mobile Application space is not dead, but the classic definition of what it is to be a Mobile Application is changing.”
What will Adobe announce at MIX? What will Nokia, if anything, say at MIX? Time will tell, but the runtime platform wars have officially begun with Microsoft pledging to bring their bits to all of Nokia’s devices. This is the next step in the race towards one mobile platform for developing. Sure there will be multiple operating systems, hell there may even be more than one runtime, but pretty soon the industry is going to demand a set of standards so that web services can interact with the hardware. Sun tried it with J2ME, that obviously didn’t work, but something tells me the industry will get it right the second time around.
[Via: Nokia PR, All About Symbian]