Square's Keith Rabois: Websites are dead, reinvent for mobile

April 25, 2011 6:56 PM
Anthony Ha

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Keith Rabois, a startup veteran who’s now chief operating officer at Square, didn’t mince words today when he talked about the potential of mobile startups. He said “the website as you know it” is “dead, dying, will be dying,” and that the future lies in reinventing Web experiences on the mobile phone.

When you take that approach, the large, eyebrow-raising investments in mobile social startups like Instagram and Color make more sense, Rabois said — they’re not just investments in mobile apps, but in companies that want to reinvent Facebook for the mobile phone. Likewise, Rabois invested in gaming startup TinyCo because it wants to become Zynga for the mobile phone.

Rabois spoke this afternoon at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit in Sausalito, Calif. When he talks about reinventing for mobile, he said he’s talking about building native applications for specific devices, rather than a mobile website that works on any device. A website is “not going to feel as good as a native experience,” Rabois said.

Facebook chief technology officer Bret Taylor has said that mobile websites built with the HTML5 format, rather than native apps, are “the future platform that we’re going to be looking to.” Rabois said that Facebook’s HTML5 strategy is wrong, and that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg will eventually realize that he needs to build a reinvented mobile app, just like everyone else.

Another point about mobile development from Rabois: It’s not the same as including geo-location features. Yes, geo is one part of mobile, but it’s not the entirety. Rabois said that when he meets with mobile developers, he tells them, “You’re not allowed to think of geo at all. Now tell me why this is different on a mobile experience.”

And of course, Rabois sees Square as another example of this trend: “We’re not a mobile payments company. We’re a company reinventing payments on a mobile device.”

[photo by Dean Takahashi]

http://www.bigjobsboard.com/ Brad Jobs

I think all the websites in the net should already work on the mobile versions of their websites. Internet is already in the hands of users, literally! Thanks for sharing the article here.
http://amdwebservices.com/ Adam Dukes

Every website needs a mobile website as that is the future. Still on the fence about app vs. mobile site though
http://profiles.google.com/movierelics Charles Terry

Well, what do you do when you build a mobile native app for your website, then Apple turns around and rejects it because they feel it's just some articles from your website and tells you to build a HTML 5 App instead. Nevermind the fact that you've got social networking built into it, maps and PDFs, location services, comment systems, and more.
http://mikestachowiak.tumblr.com Mike Stachowiak

Keith is a very bright guy but he's going to be on the wrong side of history regarding native apps. It will take a little while, but HTML5 will emerge as the dominate app format, much as the web emerged as the dominate format over native desktop applications (less a few computationally intensive applications, eg Photoshop).Yes, native apps have long held the advantage over HTML5 in terms of functionality and performance, but that gap is closing quickly. HTML5 apps now have access to most native functionality/components – accelerometers, multitouch interfaces, geolocation, camera, contacts list, compass, local storage, etc. The performance of HTML5 is still lagging – multitouch interactions are very clunky and native hardware acceleration doesn't exist – but that won't last forever. The browsers on phones will and are getting better, multitouch will improve, and it won't be long before we see native hardware acceleration needed for games in browsers (Apple will have to keep up with Google on this one to stay competitive).Developers crave a write-once-run-anywhere application ecosystem – one in which widely supported standards rule the day. The traditional web has taken off because of this paradigm (companies flourish from low development costs and ubiquitous support). If every company has to develop 10 flavors of their application (iOS 3, iOS4, Android 1.3-3.0, Blackberry, etc), everybody suffers. Fewer apps of lower quality for consumers to enjoy.As a consumer of apps, I hope Keith is dead wrong.
TheFutureTalking

“Developers crave a write-once-run-anywhere application ecosystem”Everyone is looking for the silver bullet. Still hasn't happend. Remember when everything was going to be written in Java? Remember when Google Docs was the Office killer?And whenever you have a one-size-fits-all solution, there are compromises in performance, features, and flexibility.The only thing we know for sure is that it will get easier and cheaper to write apps, always has. Developer tools have been evolving for decades. And customer expectations of app performance will keep going up. So your slow javascript hacks to try and imitate native apps will always look like crap.I'm not holding out for the silver bullet. I'm writing apps now, because in 3 years everything has changed again anyway. If you stand on the sidelines now, someone else will write an app and poach your customers. You can't afford to wait it out.
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