>>! In T85151#961900, @RobLa-WMF wrote:
> 
> @Maryana, I have heard in meetings the murmurings of putting desktop on hold.  Not from you, and I don't think the suggestion has truly taken root in our planning process, but I believe it's well worth spelling out (or discussing) in a plenary a very general sense of the size and shape of our investment in desktop vs mobile user interface in the next year or two.  I'll grant you that there's no master plan, but I've also heard many intelligent and compelling hunches about what the right strategy is.  
> 
> We will probably need to state the (only seemingly obvious) point that it's not a zero sum game where more mobile investment == less desktop investment.  For example, while our work on Wikidata querying (T85159) was motivated by a mobile use case, there is absolutely nothing mobile specific about the service.  In fact, the heart of our strategy almost certainly needs to be minimizing the cases where we are making zero sum tradeoffs.

Investments into creating a service-oriented architecture for our projects is another example of this choice often not being zero-sum; the mobile apps as pure API consumers benefit greatly from having cleanly defined services, but in actuality this benefits any API consumer, and there are plenty of API consumers on desktop! And, although the discussion about front-end standardisation is of prime importance to mobile web and desktop, it's irrelevant for the mobile apps as they use the front-end frameworks and design patterns that come with the iOS and Android SDKs and platforms. So, even that isn't as zero-sum as it appears! :-)

On the topic of service-oriented architecture, Rob raised the astute point that although service-oriented architecture may seem obvious to us at the WMF, it may not be obvious to others. Our developer community is very decentralised, and one of the disadvantages of a decentralised community is that a bit harder to get people to rally around a totally new concept and way of doing things, such as SOA. And since there is clearly a big belief that service-oriented architecture is the future, the developer summit is a prime opportunity to speak to this decentralised community and evangelise service-oriented architecture to them. Is @gwicke planning anything such as this for the summit?