Only things that are alive can ever die.
I’ll be talking about this article. If you actually take the time to read it, I am honestly impressed, but I must make a suggestion: read the comments section too. There are several excellent comments near the top of the stack, that definitely complement the article. Note that I said ‘complement’ and not ‘compliment’. The best comments are the ones that tear apart the claims of the authors of this article, Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff.
Why do technology writers rely so heavily on grand, sensational analogies in their work? I thought I had made it clear back in my Pointy Rocks post (which the authors clearly didn’t read) that the Web is not a living organism. It is an exceptionally pointy rock, not the adoptive child of the entire world. The web isn’t dead because the web was never alive. The web is certainly changing, but to announce its death is as ridiculous as claiming your can of Sprite just asked to use the washroom. It just doesn’t happen.
The authors got a lot of things half right. Chris Anderson made the statement that since youth have more time than money, they are more apt to use elements of the web that take more effort, but have the advantage of being free. For example, fire sharing is prevalent among youth, because they are willing to put forth the effort necessary to download torrents of pirated movies. More aged users have more money and less time to spend than youth. Because of this, they would rather just pay to get exactly what they want quickly. Both young and old want the same final product, but the methods to get the item changes with the resources available. Anderson got up to here right, but when he tries to relate the above information to the popularity of apps, his arguments fall short.
Anderson states that people pay for the quality of service (QoS) and convenience of apps. According to him, the best quality of an application is that it brings to the user exactly what they want with limited effort on their part. If this were true, we would never have moved away from desktop applications. We would be using Google.exe or the Mac equivalent if applications were king. Instead we use applications to access the web, which in turn provides users with a vast selection of services. There is ample selection and variety. It is much more convenient to open one application and browse using it than it is to open a specific app for the specific action you want to perform. Why use 5 apps when you can open one and get all the same information? It doesn’t make sense.
According to this article, HTML5 is an attempt to make the Web more app-like. Developers want to make websites run smoothly and easily. In its youth, only those with technical knowledge could aptly use the web. Since then, the web has become more accessible and easier to use without advanced knowledge of network systems. The authors of the article mistook the ease of use of applications for the next step of development. Apps are so easy to use because they present such a limited amount of stuff. There’s no other word to use than stuff. The typical browser has to show so many different types of media, that it is just not feasible to make it perfectly streamlined. When web controls improve, apps will be entirely unnecessary.
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