[opendtv] The Web Is Dying; Apps Are Killing It - WSJ - WSJ
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 07:20:03 -0500
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-web-is-dying-apps-are-killing-it-1416169934
The Web Is Dying; Apps Are Killing It
Phil Foster
By
Christopher Mims
Nov. 16, 2014 3:32 p.m. ET
The Web—that thin veneer of human-readable design on top of the machine babble
that constitutes the Internet—is dying. And the way it’s dying has
farther-reaching implications than almost anything else in technology today.
Think about your mobile phone. All those little chiclets on your screen are
apps, not websites, and they work in ways that are fundamentally different from
the way the Web does.
Mountains of data tell us that, in aggregate, we are spending time in apps that
we once spent surfing the Web. We’re in love with apps, and they’ve taken over.
On phones, 86% of our time is spent in apps, and just 14% is spent on the Web,
according to mobile-analytics company Flurry.
This might seem like a trivial change. In the old days, we printed out
directions from the website MapQuest that were often wrong or confusing. Today
we call up Waze on our phones and are routed around traffic in real time. For
those who remember the old way, this is a miracle.
Everything about apps feels like a win for users—they are faster and easier to
use than what came before. But underneath all that convenience is something
sinister: the end of the very openness that allowed Internet companies to grow
into some of the most powerful or important companies of the 21st century.
Take that most essential of activities for e-commerce: accepting credit cards.
When Amazon.com made its debut on the Web, it had to pay a few percentage
points in transaction fees. But Apple takes 30% of every transaction conducted
within an app sold through its app store, and “very few businesses in the world
can withstand that haircut,” says Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist at
Andreessen Horowitz.
App stores, which are shackled to particular operating systems and devices, are
walled gardens where Apple, Google , Microsoft and Amazon get to set the rules.
For a while, that meant Apple banned Bitcoin, an alternative currency that many
technologists believe is the most revolutionary development on the Internet
since the hyperlink. Apple regularly bans apps that offend its politics, taste,
or compete with its own software and services.
But the problem with apps runs much deeper than the ways they can be controlled
by centralized gatekeepers. The Web was invented by academics whose goal was
sharing information. Tim Berners-Lee was just trying to make it easy for
scientists to publish data they were putting together during construction of
CERN, the world’s biggest particle accelerator.
No one involved knew they were giving birth to the biggest creator and
destroyer of wealth anyone had ever seen. So, unlike with app stores, there was
no drive to control the early Web. Standards bodies arose—like the United
Nations, but for programming languages. Companies that would have liked to wipe
each other off the map were forced, by the very nature of the Web, to come
together and agree on revisions to the common language for Web pages.
The result: Anyone could put up a Web page or launch a new service, and anyone
could access it. Google was born in a garage. Facebook was born in Mark
Zuckerberg ’s dorm room.
But app stores don’t work like that. The lists of most-downloaded apps now
drive consumer adoption of those apps. Search on app stores is broken.
The Web is built of links, but apps don’t have a functional equivalent.
Facebook and Google are trying to fix this by creating a standard called “deep
linking,” but there are fundamental technical barriers to making apps behave
like websites.
The Web was intended to expose information. It was so devoted to sharing above
all else that it didn’t include any way to pay for things—something some of its
early architects regret to this day, since it forced the Web to survive on
advertising.
The Web wasn’t perfect, but it created a commons where people could exchange
information and goods. It forced companies to build technology that was
explicitly designed to be compatible with competitors’ technology. Microsoft’s
Web browser had to faithfully render Apple’s website. If it didn’t, consumers
would use another one, such as Firefox or Google’s Chrome, which has since
taken over.
Today, as apps take over, the Web’s architects are abandoning it. Google’s
newest experiment in email nirvana, called Inbox, is available for both Android
and Apple’s iOS, but on the Web it doesn’t work in any browser except Chrome.
The process of creating new Web standards has slowed to a crawl. Meanwhile,
companies with app stores are devoted to making those stores better than—and
entirely incompatible with—app stores built by competitors.
“In a lot of tech processes, as things decline a little bit, the way the world
reacts is that it tends to accelerate that decline,” says Mr. Dixon. “If you go
to any Internet startup or large company, they have large teams focused on
creating very high quality native apps, and they tend to de-prioritize the
mobile Web by comparison.”
Many industry watchers think this is just fine. Ben Thompson, an independent
tech and mobile analyst, told me he sees the dominance of apps as the “natural
state” for software.
Ruefully, I have to agree. The history of computing is companies trying to use
their market power to shut out rivals, even when it’s bad for innovation and
the consumer.
That doesn’t mean the Web will disappear. Facebook and Google still rely on it
to furnish a stream of content that can be accessed from within their apps. But
even the Web of documents and news items could go away. Facebook has announced
plans to host publishers’ work within Facebook itself, leaving the Web nothing
but a curiosity, a relic haunted by hobbyists.
I think the Web was a historical accident, an anomalous instance of a powerful
new technology going almost directly from a publicly funded research lab to the
public. It caught existing juggernauts like Microsoft flat-footed, and it led
to the kind of disruption today’s most powerful tech companies would prefer to
avoid.
It isn’t that today’s kings of the app world want to quash innovation, per se.
It is that in the transition to a world in which services are delivered through
apps, rather than the Web, we are graduating to a system that makes innovation,
serendipity and experimentation that much harder for those who build things
that rely on the Internet. And today, that is pretty much everyone.
—Follow Christopher Mims on Twitter @Mims; write to him at
christopher.mims@xxxxxxx.
Regards
Craig
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