"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...
infrageeks
Comments
Actually designed for a NeXT box (unauthenticated)
Oct 22, 2009
The world wide web was created on a NeXTbox, and we all know OS X is the descendant of NeXT.
Why don't we get it from the horse's mouth? (unauthenticated)
Oct 22, 2009
Hey Al Gore, when you invented the internet, what was it designed for?
jbooo (unauthenticated)
Oct 22, 2009
Um, no, the internet was designed for secure Government communication wayyyyyy before the sheople saw it, and it was built on UNIX (Free BSD to be exact)...
Don (unauthenticated)
Oct 23, 2009
jbooo, you're not paying attention. The INTERNET was designed for government communication long ago (as DARPANET). The World Wide Web, not the Internet, was, in fact, created on a NeXTbox by Tim Berners-Lee.
Oh, and the "Al Gore invented the internet" is a false claim made by idiot right-wing toadies to insult Gore. He never made the statement. He was, in part, responsible for supporting legislation that helped entrepreneurs get the internet rolling, and he has been honored for that by no less than Vint Cerf, the so-called "Father of the Internet." See Snopes for the facts. Of course, truth never bothers right-wing wack jobs when truthiness will do.
actual the internet was designed to link 3 different networks (unauthenticated)
Oct 23, 2009
packet modem, terrestrial, satellite?