Time & Perspective Quote by Miguel de Icaza

Underneath the wonky phrase "cross-platform story" is a prediction about power: whoever controls the runtime controls what gets built, who gets hired, and which products get to feel inevitable. Miguel de Icaza is talking like an engineer with a strategist’s instinct. He isn’t selling “compatibility” as a feel-good ideal; he’s warning that once software demands serious time - the kind of sunk-cost labor that makes you cling to a toolchain - users and companies will stop tolerating platform lock-in and start demanding portability.

The example is telling. Movie editing is shorthand for high-stakes, workflow-heavy creation: huge files, specialized plugins, keyboard muscle memory, collaboration pipelines. In the enterprise desktop, de Icaza admits, that kind of consumer-grade creative workload was once irrelevant. Offices ran email, spreadsheets, internal apps. But he’s anticipating a consumerization wave, where the “serious” apps people care about aren’t just on corporate machines, and where the desktop can’t hide behind IT standardization. When consumers arrive, they arrive with taste, devices, and impatience.

The subtext is also a quiet critique of single-vendor ecosystems: if your app takes months to learn and years to master, users won’t accept that switching hardware means abandoning their craft. “Story” is the key word - cross-platform isn’t merely engineering; it’s narrative and reassurance. Developers need to believe their effort won’t be stranded on the wrong island. De Icaza is pitching a future where portability isn’t a feature, it’s a survival trait.