We’ve read a lot lately about why developers and publishers should take a “mobile first” approach to building apps and websites, but Rachel King at ZDNet asks whether “mobile second” might be a better strategy for making money and improving productivity in the business world. In her piece covering a panel at MobileBeat 2013, King writes that executives from several major players in enterprise software discussed “how they found success on the desktop first” before expanding those wares to mobile.

Adopting a “mobile second” strategy certainly makes sense for scenarios where a laptop or desktop is still the most appropriate tool for the job. (And yes, there are still plenty of uses for those devices.) But the takeaway quote from King’s piece comes from Alex Bard, a senior vice president at Salesforce.com: “We actually think about each device,” Bard said, “then the context, the use case, and how you create a micro-moment experience to leverage that device.”

I’ll confess I’m unsure what “a micro-moment experience” is, but Bard is right on the money. The development community all too often argues whether “mobile first” is the right stance, but there is no one-size-fits-all strategy when building apps for multiple hardware platforms. IT types, developers and managers should always think first about what they’re trying to accomplish with their apps, and how and where those apps need to be used. Only then should they try to figure out which kinds of hardware should be the top priority, and how their apps should be optimized for those platforms.