The ideal, yet unlikely, future is that these diverse vendors will come together to set universal standards. Otherwise, our destiny is in the hands of consumer products companies. We must assume people will view these computing devices as being connected to the network all the time. We might not be able to dictate what browser, for example, is on a device, but we can program the information that appears there. Lots of people will have powerful devices, not just PC devices.
Customers expect a realtime, data-rich experience.
Today, there's no room for a nine-megabyte client app on a WAP phone. Our assumptions determine the baseline for our future platform. We need to determine whether we'll have access to streaming media, for example, and whether it'll be easy to incorporate into an application. The computing platform today makes it difficult to determine the greatest common denominator. When I was coding 20 years ago, there were vastly fewer variables.