Mowser Founder Says Mobile Web Is Dead. It's The Opposite: The Mobile Web Was Born Only Yesterday

mowser.jpgThe Mobile Web is dead, says entreprenuer Russell Beattie, and it’s time for him to deadpool Mowser. Read the details in Duncan’s post from earlier today.

Now I certainly think that the day of creating specialty stripped down version of web pages for mobile devices is coming to an end (and that’s what Mowser did). Small screens with poor bandwidth equals an unusable product. In the U.S. today almost all mobile browsing occurs on smart phones with big screens and full keyboards. The iPhone in particular is browsing friendly as users can simply move the screen around with their fingers, and zoom in or out on the extremely crisp screen.

In short, the gains in hardware have made a special markup language for phones redundant. More and more people will be getting true smart phones in their hards that can open and view normal webpages quickly. and see the entire screen. We no longer need middleman software to convert normal websites into stuff that lesser phones can understand. It will be much better to push prices down so that todays iPhone is available for next to nothing in the third world. The First world will have moved on to increasingly better devises.

So I disagree that The Mobile Web is dead. For many of us it is just coming alive. Given the speed at which these devices are evolving and price dropping, I don’t think it’s worth people’s time to build sofware that optimizes the experience. Rather, they should use their expertise to build exciting new applications that will run directly on these new platforms.

So don’t think of this as the death of your startuup, Russell. Think of it as an opportunity to let your creativity fly while you imagine how you can change the world. My guess is you’ll land somewhere very interesting, and start building software that will be used passionately by your users.