Bill Baxter CTO of Cozi, which offers a set of applications to keep busy families organized, spoke at the Thursday's Eastside Networking event. Bill offered a blend of "prognosticating and bitching" about the state of web and mobile apps. Citing an "unstoppable juggernaut named Apple," he warned that the current rate of platform proliferation — iOS, Facebook, Windows Phone 7, Windows 7/8 (desktop), Android, Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer 9, HTML5, Blackberry OS, Yahoo Connected TV, Google TV - was unsustainable. Providers of web-based apps face Sisyphean development cycles to simply to accommodate the major platforms.
Jonathan Zittrain addresses this conundrum from the end-user perspective in The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It. Users increasingly access the open network through tethered devices such as the iPhone and the X-Box which are locked-down. Innovation has moved from the edge of the network to the creation of user silos. We experience the internet through beautiful walled gardens of our own choosing. Maybe we need to revisit the iconic Apple Superbowl commercial that introduced the Macintosh and ask "why 1984 won't be like "1984"."