Too many mobile operating systems?

Vodafone's CEO, Arun Sarin, has used his Mobile Wireless Congress speech to call for mobile OS consolidation. He's claiming it's a pain to develop for up to 30 different incompatible systems (though, in a clear reference to Microsoft, he also confirmed he didn't want just one).

Smartphone operating systems are such a new and rapidly developing field that it's not surprising there are so many. There will naturally be consolidation as the big players invest.

It's incredible to me that he just doesn't get the answer - develop in HTML, CSS and javascript! Modern browsers like Firefox 3 and Safari 3 contain all you need - including HTML5 offline storage - to deliver compelling applications. Sarin's developers are focused on the wrong layer in the stack.

The theme of the 2008 Mobile Wireless Congress is supposed to be internet applications. That's a start, but still not clear enough. Let's hope the 2009 Mobile Wireless Congress theme should be web applications.

Tabbed Browsing

Tabbed browsing has been one of the key recent improvements to the web. It's made it far easier to work with multiple pages - many people keep dozens of tabs open for days, waiting for the opportunity to read or complete them. It was one of the main selling points behind Internet Explorer 7.

And yet, tabbed browsing is terrible. You can't resize, reshape and move tabs, like you can normal windows - they're all stuck at the size of the browser window. You can't search across every tab. And they blatantly overlap with the taskbar, for those using Windows.

Is there a better approach than tabs? Sure - think how you organise pieces of paper on a desk. They're in piles, at various angles, and at any point you can bring them to the front and work on them. But hmm - pieces of paper tend to get lost or crumpled under others.

I still don't think anyone has properly implemented a simple, powerful, and intuitive interface for working with multiple documents visually. That seems ridiculous - what on earth have we been doing for so long!

We can guess at what a solution might look like - a multi-touch screen allowing document resize and zoom, a quick search function across open documents, some way to remember default document dimensions. Some combination of Mozilla SVG photos and Jeff Han's multi-touch.

In the meantime it's worth pointing out that, for all their advantages, tabbed browsers are only a quick and dirty fix to the problem of working across multiple documents.

MSFT!

So it happened. Microsoft finally took the plunge and made a offer to Yahoo! they couldn't refuse.

Microsoft's reasoning is straightforward - they want to catch up with Google in the search and advertising business, which will require tens of billions of dollars of capital investment in the next few years. Sharing that load is a no-brainer; this is a game where scale wins.

Though Microsoft are focusing on the first two elements of Google's tagline "search, ads and apps" with their acquisition, I find their apps strategy - "Live" far more interesting.

Live has never seemed coherent. There is Microsoft live, Windows Live, and Office live. There is Hotmail Live, not to be confused with Windows Mail Live. All of these products overlap in confusing ways with their traditional client software equivalents. It's an utter mess, and it still seems to be going nowhere, perhaps due to cultural problems - Microsoft still don't seem to get the web.

Similarly, Yahoo's apps seem to have no connections or synergy between them, and they have a serious "peanut butter" prioritisation issue. However, in Yahoo's case, they at least own some incredible assets (Flickr, del.icio.us, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Music), and some talented people that truly understand the web.

Hopefully the merger will force both companies to list their apps and place them in a simple, overarching framework. For example, a matrix with content types (text, raster images, vector images, audio, video) versus functions (CRUD, publish, collaborate, version, syndicate, search, store). That would even beat Google at their goal of features, not products. Because every month they dither, Google will move even further ahead.