What are we going to do about mobile?

[James W Hofmann via Digitalmars-d]

I happened across this old thread in a search for "mobile app 
dlang". I got a Chromebook recently and it represents a 
substantial phase shift in devices for me:

* It's an ARM laptop (Asus Chromebook R13, big.LITTLE 2/2 cores, 
4GB memory)
* It's also a tablet convertible
* The main OS is the web browser
* The secondary OS is a Linux desktop(via Crouton)
* The other secondary OS is Android(Play Store support)
* They all run simultaneously. ChromeOS supports this with minor 
end-user configuration(hit some secret shortcut keys for 
developer mode, run a shell script, click some boxes).
* It cost under $300 (refurbished) and it's "high end" for the 
product segment, and feels like it

Which means I have ~three software ecosystems(two if you're 
feeling uncharitable,  since all of them can do some web 
browsing) on the same device, all representing different market 
segments but more-or-less successfully converged. Although some 
things like clipboard compatibility aren't in the offing, I can 
switch between them with shortcut keys and share parts of the 
file system without any virtualization or rebooting. And "high 
end mobile" performance covers so many applications that as an 
individual I can only justify trading up for certain heavy 
workloads(large code-bases, high-end gaming, some media editing 
and encoding). If I were feeling daring I could also try running 
Wine, but that's better left to the x86 Chromebooks.

It's gotten me thinking that what we're looking at now is really 
a fully converged computing environment where monopolistic 
bottlenecks on software platforms are  eroded, leaving us back in 
the position of generic device form factors(type and  quantity of 
I/O, energy efficiency requirements) as the main constraints on 
the  application. So "mobile" may also cease to be a category of 
substance at the same time as "desktop" and "Web". We'll just 
have "front-end"/"client", plus some UI forms to cover different 
devices.

At least, that's where we're going. But it's not "there" yet 
except in this particular product line, since Google is forcing 
the issue in it - and the sales figures do suggest that it's 
carving up the PC category and invading schools everywhere.

That thought is playing in my head against recent advertising of 
BetterC - the USP of "give new life to old code" seems like the 
most straightforward way to address this future, since if we 
change our set of assumptions away from "new platforms" in the 
usual sense of a technology shift provoking boil-the-ocean 
rewrites, but instead to a continual agglomeration of new into 
old and old into new, with most shifts occurring within the 
existing stacks instead of without, then leveraging old code by 
every means possible becomes the most important thing.

Which leads me to a great armchair proposal: D should support 
Excel spreadsheets ;)