“Let’s face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone,” Ballmer said. “That’s why they’ve got 75,000 applications — they’re all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone.”
–AP Newswire (tip of the hat to Daring Fireball)
Another Ballmer quotation that highlights (yet again) the fact that he just. doesn’t. get it. The internet wasn’t designed for iPhones or PCs. It wasn’t designed for plugging in Netflix enabled Blu-Ray players either. It was designed to be a reliable, neutral, platform agnostic communications network.
The fact that we have built up an ecosystem of web sites that are optimized for 1024x768 screens with mouse based interaction is a product of the times and the available tools.
I’ve been on the Internet since ~1993 and back then the tools included xmodem, uucp, gopher, ftp, terminal sessions, pine, etc. It certainly wasn’t designed around YouTube Flash and H.264 streaming video, but as capacity came available these possibilities started appearing.
Times change, tools change and the terminals evolve. The internet of tomorrow will take into account the demands of mobile users on many platforms, but probably optimized for the iPhone since it has clearly positioned itself as the leader in mobile internet access.
In fact, I think that this era of the “Internet designed for PCs” represents a blip in history when you look at the pace of adoption of internet connected mobile technologies from laptops to netbooks to iPhones, to Kindles, to the next big thing…