I’m going to tell everyone publicly what I’ve been telling (in some cases yelling) to our management for over a year, and I strongly suggest you start doing the same within your own company. Are you ready?  Repeat after me: “Take budget away from desktop/web development and start developing for smartphones and tablet RIGHT NOW!”

Repeat this until A) you get the go-ahead, or B) you get fired. B isn’t as bad as it sounds. If your company doesn’t “get it” at this point, then there is a good chance you’ll be looking for a new job in the near future anyway as your nearsighted company fades into oblivion because they failed to have vision.

Since I’m still employed at MarketStar, you can deduce that option A worked out for me.

The fact is your desktop development projects have an enormous opportunity cost because they are directly taking away from what you could be doing on mobile platforms!

Putting desktop/web projects into maintenance mode and using your existing resources on mobile is the right decision for many of us and I’ll shout it from the rooftops as long as I need to. Note that I said “many” and not “all,” there is still a great need for non-mobile projects and it’s up to you to decide what’s more important in meeting your goals.

The tech world is evolving and there is an ever-increasing need for mobile software and services:

• Younger generations in the workforce prefer mobile solutions.
• Smartphone adoption exploded in 2010 and continues to build.
• 2011 will see enormous adoption rates for tablets.
• User experience and productivity on mobile is superior to PC in some cases.
• The social Internet is changing the way we do business.
• Once people get a taste of using mobile devices for productivity, they crave more.
• As people and workforces become more mobile and decentralized, the tools required to support them also must go mobile.

As you identify problems that need to be resolved with software, you now have a serious decision to make that didn’t exist a year ago: Will this software satisfy my users better on the desktop or on a mobile device? If you don’t answer this question upfront in your discovery stage, you’re doing a huge disservice to your end users and eventually you’ll regret it.

If you only take one thing away from this article, let it be this: If your company is not investing in mobile tools, then your company is being left behind and you better do everything in your power to change it!