Every so often I look back on my blog entries, as well as look at other news in the blogosphere of enterprise mobility and say to myself, now why didn't I think of "that?" Let me tell you briefly about a post that I never wrote a few months back when I was started looking at Cloud Computing and its impact on enterprise mobility.
While the thought process started when I met Cemaphore Systems, it continued when I went to the Mobile Business Expo at Interop to moderate a panel on mobile web browsers. Regrettably, I actually was never able to fully formulate my thoughts into words on this blog. That's too bad, because in hindsight I can tell you I was on to something.
The idea goes something like this: If The Cloud is becoming increasingly pervasive (which it is) and mobile browsers are getting better every day (which they are), then do you need anything more on your mobile device beyond a browser that can access The Cloud? Can browser widgets provide you enough functionality such that you don't need applications "per se" on your device and that instead you can get everything you need done via Widgets that leverage your mobile browser to access The Cloud? Think about the potential impact on enterprise mobility. Organizations are deploying more and more SaaS based applications...there is no reason mobile workers couldn't access those applications on their devices - assuming they had enough bandwidth (read: 3G, or 4G such as LTE) with a browser that could actually FULLY handle web standards. Then imagine how a mobile OS (or handset) manufacturer could then partner with SaaS vendors to provide enterprises complete Cloud-based computing solutions that work both on and off-site. Now that would be cool.
So now it's January 2009. Enter Palm's new webOS.
So the new webOS, is not EXACTLY what I was thinking about, but it's pretty damn close. While there is a core layer to the new webOS that is built on Linux, the new SDK (called Mojo) is all based upon creating widgets that interact with the WebKit-based browser. Now I'm not a developer, but it strikes me that this could be highly attractive to the developer community. "Simple" (meaning, commonly used) languages to develop applications, that in theory could/should work on any device that leverages the WebKit browser core. Please correct me if I am wrong on this last piece.
Regardless, this creates a great opportunity for Palm to leverage its developer community, as well as widget developers to create/port applications for both consumer and enterprise use. Now if I were Palm, I would be aggressively looking also to partner with large SaaS players, including Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and even Microsoft to see how they can develop both consumer and enterprise friendly solutions. This would help build the credibility of and momentum for adoption of the Pre and any other device Palm will create based upon the new webOS platform.
I just wish I had written this when I originally had the idea.
