Everything Isn’t Moving To the Web

2009.11.23   prev     next

Back in the mid-1990s, there was popular punditry that computing was going to move entirely to the web. According to this theory, you wouldn’t even need a regular OS — you would do everything in a web browser. Soon, they said, you would be able to buy computers that didn’t even have a traditional OS; they would just boot directly into the Netscape Navigator web browser. Netscape would become the new OS.

Microsoft, the purveyor of the dominant OS, took these stories very seriously, and — noticing that Netscape didn’t seem to be developing a true app language for the browser — decided to develop its own browser (IE) with a built-in programming language.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, Sun surprised everyone by coming out with Java, which Netscape immediately adopted, and so Microsoft had to scrap their own unfinished language and adopt Java too (in IE). But, with no programming-language-leg-up against Netscape, they had to come up with some other strategy. That turned out to be a plethora of anti-competitive tactics, and the rest is history: big legal problems and no solid, Windows-esque domination of the web.

The irony of the story is that today, almost fifteen years after that web-is-the-future punditry, we can see that it didn’t even happen. Yes, the web is a hugely important part of computing. No, it isn’t replacing the traditional OS, or the stand-alone app. Stand-alone apps will always be massively faster, more responsive, and — now with the iPhone — more piracy-resistant (and therefore enticing to the typical developer) than web apps.

I bring this story up because I’m starting to notice that a significant portion of the anti-iPhone bitterness on the part of some developers (hacker-tinkerer-nerds?) is taking the tone of “everyone of pure motive is supposed to be moving to the web, and the iPhone App Store is clearly an impure attack on that.” Witness this comment from Chris Messina’s “The Death of the URL”:

New flash: The App Store is not the web. It’s not supposed to be the web. It’s not going to be the “death” of the web. The App Store is about stand-alone apps, optimized for snappy execution on a local, portable device, and with enough of a barrier to casual piracy to make it worthwhile for developers to gleefully write over 100,000 apps in record time.

The web isn’t going anywhere. And neither are stand-alone apps. Get over it.

It’s always walking on unstable ground to guess at ulterior motives, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most (not necessarily all) of the “we want web apps, not the App Store” outcry is really based on people who spent the past decade becoming very good at creating web apps, and see their long-honed skills significantly diminished in value by the emergence of a new, big, non-web development platform.