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| Fred Wilson (Photo credit: Lachlan Hardy) |
I think Mobile First, Web Second made perfect sense at the time, but that was an aggression needed to balance out the over emphasis on the Old Web we had seen to that point.
But the truth is it is not web first or mobile first. It is neither. It is user first. And the best applications going forward will be platform agnostic. As long as you use it, it does not matter what platform you use it on. And your behavior, your interactions will be collected in the Big Data world to glean insights on you - not necessarily to serve ads in sneaky ways - that can have huge commercial values. LinkedIn is a great example on that monetization strategy. LinkedIn does not make money because you visit it several times a day. You don't. How many times are you going to look at your own resume? Unless you are unemployed and are anal about that condition.
Mobile First, Web Second - Fred Wilson's most popular and most quoted blog post of 2010 - was right on for 2010. But with hindsight we have to see it was there to counterbalance Web And Web Alone, the thesis that had been ruling the space for more than a decade to that point, more like a decade and a half.
The app of today and tomorrow has to exist on all platforms - the laptop, the tablet, the smartphone - and more platforms than are in vogue today. Think wristwatch, think TV screen, think movie screen. Think platforms made possible by the gesture - NUI, Natural User Interface - going mainstream.
It is not about the platform, it is about the user.
Vibhu Norby misses the point. Although what he has said are points worth considering by those who are thinking monetization in the short run.
