- Fast and Furious .NET Programming
- Explosive Demand
- Healthy Competition
Explosive Demand
The stage has been set for this explosion in mobile programming for a while. According to RCR Wireless News, more cellphones are used in China than in the United States. The reported number is 120.6 million. This is an astounding fact by itself, but even more astounding is that current cellphone ownership is only 10 percent of the overall market size. There are still a lot of cellphones to be bought in the People's Republic. And those inexpensive mobile devices known as cellphones will need applications to satisfy the ever-increasing hardware power being delivered.
The dynamic of the proliferation of cheap, powerful hardware creating increased demand for applications is not new. Before 1990, personal computers were still relatively expensive commodities that had limited practical purpose for most consumers. Businesses could well afford to pay more than $3,000 for a PC: The increase in per-employee productivity was worth the investment. But for most consumers, the cost was prohibitive. At that time, there wasn't any Internet, and Windows was still in its infancy. Most consumers did not own computers, and most software development was business related.
Then three trends converged: Computers dropped in price, programs with a graphical user interface became more widespread and more stable, and the tools for creating graphical programs become cheaper to own and easier to use, as evidenced by Microsoft's release of Visual Basic and Borland's pricing of Turbo Pascal for a whopping $149. Things took off. More people owned PCs. More people programmed PCs, particularly Windows PCs. The Internet happened, Sun Microsystems took notice of the graphical programming paradigm, and, voila[ag], you have Java, a significant competitor in the Windows programming space.
History is now repeating itself.