Ajaxian has a post up about an article from the former VP of Palm regarding the death of Mobile Application development at the hands of the web. I’ve been chewing on a mobile web app in my head the last few weeks for my startup (I still spend time at CNET, I also recently launched my own project) and reading this was interesting. Here’s a short clip from the Ajaxian post, which itself is an excerpt from the full article.

Michael Mace, a former Palm VP, says the business of native mobile apps is dying. He includes a quote from Palm veteran Elia Freedman summarizing why some of us have found mobile application development to be a deeply frustrating experience.

From the technical perspective, there are a couple of big issues. One is the proliferation of operating systems. Back in the late 1990s there were two platforms we had to worry about, Pocket PC and Palm OS. Symbian was there too, but it was in Europe and few people here were paying attention. Now there are at least ten platforms. Microsoft alone has several — two versions of Windows Mobile, Tablet PC, and so on. [Elia didn’t mention it, but the fragmentation of Java makes this situation even worse.]

I call it three million platforms with a hundred users each (link).