Dan Bricklin has a lengthy but worthwhile piece on the challenges facing the startup developer these days that puts some meat behind Zuckerberg's concern of a few months ago that building a consumer facing web service today has become a lot harder due to the challenges of supporting the myriad of endpoint devices.

During the 2005 "everyone loves AJAX" era when I started Tabblo, front-end engineering meant Firefox2/Safari2 and the dreaded IE6 challenges of making the DOM dance. Today if you are working on any semi-interesting service you are also likely to want to support iPhone OS 3.x/4 out of the gate, Android 2.X, and likely also the iPad (which though it now carries the iOS 4.2 moniker actually tends to require a ground up rewrite). So what was a 1 man effort in 2005 is now a 2-3 man job at minimum. And every entrepreneur who I meet who tells me they can outsource this is fooling themselves in much the same way that the MBAs who claim they can outsource technology do.

Combine this with the super lean seed funded craze of late and you've got a situation where you now have to cover 3 salaries (even at Ramen levels this adds up) where before there was 1 to say nothing of the additional challenges around UX and QA. The math of what you can do with $200-500K starts to look weird when you factor this in.

I've been trying to hold on to the hope that projects like jQuery mobile will make a lot of this a short term pain but Dan's post points to the reality of interface modalities which may make this a pipe dream at best.

In a resource constrained environment I'd hate to see people prioritizing mobile (and specifically iPhone) over more horizontally accessible interfaces like the modern web browser but in a world of "mobile first" this would be exactly what I'd do.

Help us Obi Wan (Google?), you're our only hope...