I have a friend who was an accountant, found that he liked writing VBA scripts in Excel, and eventually wound up at a company big enough to need an IT department but small enough not to afford a big one, and now he's basically got a dual CFO/CIO role. Every six months or so he tells me about the new mobile app he's got in development for the salesmen to place orders, or for manufacturing line inspectors to check inventory, or something. I always point out that it would be cheaper, faster, and more general to just build a wep application, and he always rolls his eyes and tells me I don't understand the marketing power of mobile apps.

Which is true, I don't. But it got me thinking about all the "browser is the new OS" and "the Internet is OS-agnostic" and "this is the end of Microsoft" talk from the late 90s. Anyone else remember those days? Because Steve Jobs and the IPhone pretty much undid it all. It's 15 years later and everyone cares about the OS again. Weird.