Ben Thompson’s Mobile First post is an interesting read and his perspective is always fascinating. (I pay $100 per year to be a member. I can’t recommend it enough.) It’s not the post itself that has me thinking, though, specifically, it’s footnote #4:

Microsoft’s “Mobile First Cloud First” strategy makes much more sense now, no?

Here’s the thought: can you really be mobile first without being cloud first? Mobile first means everything you do is different because people have a computer in their pockets all the time. (And by people, I mean all people on the planet in the next few years.) What enables mobile first, though, is that every one of these devices is connected to the cloud, and its the cloud that lets us connect outside the device.

So can you have one without the other?

I think a lot of us indie developers have tried for years to be mobile first without being cloud first, and I think that is part of the reason it has been so hard to make a living. Infinity Softworks is a perfect example of that. It came to be in the mobile era. I wrote my first apps for PalmPilot and later Windows Mobile, and we have made the bulk of our revenues over 18 years from selling apps for mobile devices.

The first generation of our products were fixed. It had a certain number of bundled calculations and that was it. But that was okay. The devices were underpowered and completely disconnected from the Internet.

The second generation of our products had some bundled calculations but also allowed customers to write they own. They were still on disconnected devices, though. Yes, you could email a file but that is a far cry from being Cloud First. Again the devices were largely disconnected though, at least they were until 2007 when we wrote a BlackBerry version, and then 2008 when we could write for iPhone. Over the past few years, though, those connections have only gotten better and more pervasive. Our apps have not.

Even to this day powerOne is primarily a stand-alone application that has very minimal connection to the outside world. The only cloud connection it has at all, besides emailing results and formulas, is an in app library of calculations you can download from, but even that is buried at the bottom of the home screen in a tiny button. It’s hardly front and center in the product.

These first two generations were Mobile First, but neither one was Cloud First. Over time, as the devices have gotten better and faster connections, our revenues from powerOne have waned. I’m thinking there’s a connection.

A few years ago we set to work on the third generation of our products (a little at a time). We started out writing mobile apps but about a year ago we switched and started developing the web version first. While I didn’t have words for it at the time I sensed that the cloud was important to making a sustainable product and that by developing a web version first it would help us shift our mental framework.

Now we think in terms of systems rather than mobile apps. For the first time I believe we are thinking Mobile First Cloud First, and I believe it will have a huge impact on our fortunes.