Marc Andreessen has a thought exercise for you.
Let’s say we all grew up in tech world where we only used tablets and smartphones. Then one day, someone comes up to you with a 27-inch display hooked up to a notebook. You could have everything you have on your tablets and smartphones, and then some. Except you don’t have to download anything or update it. Everything is the latest and greatest, and just one click away. If you are a software developer, there are no gatekeepers telling you if your latest creation is approved, or when you can add the latest flourish.
“We would be like, wow, that’s great,” Andreessen says from his office at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “It’s why in the long run the mobile web is going to dominate native apps, and for the same reason that on the desktop the web dominates apps. When the web works for something, it works way better in a whole lot of ways than a downloadable app.”
That logic, the advantages of the web as a platform connected to a computer with a big screen, mouse and a keyboard is why one of Andreessen’s investments, Rockmelt has in some ways gone back to the future. Rockmelt is debuting not the latest tablet software, nor a new mobile app (though they have refreshed their mobile offering), but a website. (The first 5,000 readers can check it out here.)
“I know,” says Rockmelt CTO and co-founder Tim Howes. “We are all client software people, and we didn’t build a client.”
When Rockmelt launched in 2009, Howes and his co-founder and CEO Eric Vishria did build a client. Rockmelt debuted as the world’s first “social browser,” supported by big-name and big-money backer Andreessen. Just as Andreessen had done when he co-created the world’s first popular web browser in the early ‘90s, Rockmelt was going to change how we all used and navigated the increasingly social web. Except, for the most part, people stuck with old habits and old browsers. And while Vishria says 4.5 million folks downloaded the Rockmelt browser, it clearly didn’t catch fire like it needed to.
Vishria and Howes turned their focus to tablets and smartphones, launching native apps for both in the last year. But now they have returned to the desktop with their latest software effort. “Comparing mobile and the desktop is like comparing China and the United States,” Vishria says. “China is a super-important for any company, like mobile is, but the U.S. is still a very important market.”
What they have learned over the past several years has clearly informed Rockmelt for Web. “The strategy has always been, find out what works, and throw out all the crap that doesn’t,” Vishria says. In the early days of Rockmelt, that meant focusing on two strips of flowing web content, from friends, photo sites, news sites and other sources. The typical browser-like function of entering a URL or even a search query was tossed for a collection of ever changing “tiles,” constantly updated and constantly flowing past your eyes. Users simply dipped in and out.
That approach worked well for both the tablet and the smartphone, and it is super-sized in the desktop version. In early testing of the website version of Rockmelt, the engineering team found that consumption of tiles – all the stories, photos, video and other flotsam from the web that we spend out time with – soared. If it was 100 or so tiles a day on the phone, and 225 on the tablet, people were pushing 1,000 tiles consumed on the desktop. Most of it, Vishria says, is for entertainment. The experience of Rockmelt on the web attempts to offer a user experience that is geared toward having fun, rather than cranking out a spreadsheet, for example.
Whether its entertainment or not, that kind of consumption on the desktop offering, and the engagement it implies, is a strong positive signal for Rockmelt, but also for the desktop in general as an ongoing and important platform. Sure, the trajectory of tablets and smartphones is headed up and up, while the PC slumps. But there is still an install base of about 800 million PCs, Andreessen reminds, and there are all kinds of connected screens that are starting to appear in public spaces, offices and homes, a number that also will only increase. If the web, as Andreessen believes it will, can unify all those devices, so much the better.
“In a sense, these devices are kind of blurring together,” Andreessen says. “A lot of the killer apps these days – and I would say this is true of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Gmail – you can use them on whatever device you want, or use them on all the devices at the same time.
“I use the laptop at work, I use the phone when I am walking around – it’s the marrying of the smart device and the user interface back to the cloud that makes these things magical. I think this idea that we are wedded to a specific device – is going to go away.”
Until then, companies like Rockmelt will make sure they have all the device bases covered – even the desktop.
