There’s a lot of talk over the past year on the ongoing battle between iOS vs Android or Apple vs the world. Everyone has arguments for and against both sides and you’ll find it very easy to find a vast amount of blog posts on the issue. Apple’s consistent experience versus the freedom of open source. The Windows vs OSx debate reborn. I won’t try to persuade you to take one side or the other. I only want to take you back in time 16 years ago and remind you of a few things that a lot of us seem to forget these days.

Back in August of 1995 Microsoft was releasing Windows 95 and everyone was going crazy. It may sound funny right now but back then Windows 95 was the most successful operating system ever produced. Of course the Mac guys had their arguments as well and everyone was picking sides, much like now.

A few years later the Internet started to take off and other major players came up in the tech scene such as Yahoo and Google. Despite being a hostile and adventurous place at the time it kept growing and growing until our days, where everyone considers connectivity to the cyberspace a necessity. Most desktop software producers have gone out of business and only a few key players still remain. Even traditional desktop strongholds like gaming have been outgrown by web based companies such as Zynga.

Web based software had some huge advantages over native desktop solutions all the time. You don’t have to develop a separate version for each operating system, web software is cross-platform by default. You don’t have to care for the user’s hardware, the browser handles it. You don’t have to care about piracy, web software is never given to the user. Your users don’t have to be techies to use your software, it’s already installed on your server.

16 years later does it matter if Microsoft delivers a better operating system than Apple ? Who in his right mind would dare start a desktop software company today ? So real the question is: Why pick sides once more, why take place in the same pointless debate of one platform over the other ?

Of course you can be “cutting edge” and start developing for iOS or Android and make good money for a few years. Yet you must not forget then once the fad is over, the economics of scale that the web provides will prevail once more and native mobile applications will become a thing of the past just like desktop software did.