After my previous pro-Mac blog post, I bet you weren’t expecting a headline like that. But it’s true. Apple wants to destroy the web, and the iPhone was the opening salvo.Read John Gruber’s post about Apple and Flash. All of it makes sense, but Gruber fails to draw the ultimate logical conclusion. Apple would love to shun the web the same way it shuns Flash. It just can’t pull it off – yet.Apple COO Tim Cook (quoted in Gruber’s blog post) has said
“We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.”
Now, what about that sentence applies to Flash, but not to other web technologies?
For a company so obsessed with platonic ideals of technology, Apple is remarkably pragmatic. Which means, no, they’re not going to pull Safari from OS X (or iPhone) any time soon. Remember that Apple famously plugged the heck out of Microsoft Office for Mac (until they released a better solution, iWork).
Apple has already starting preparing people for a post-web world. The iPhone taught people that web apps are slow and awkward – native apps are where it’s at. I’m not quite enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe that Apple made us suffer through the iPhone web app era as a social experiment, but it certainly ended up proving that native apps are far superior to web apps, given the right native environment.
And then there’s that word, “app”. I used to think it was an odd misstep on Apple’s part to use industry lingo in a mainstream product. But no, Apple needed a new word to define the new way people would relate to their technology. “Application” was too literal, bulky, boring. “Program”? Even worse. But “app” is short, succinct, snappy – and, just coincidentally, the first syllable in “Apple”. Apps are the way you do stuff.
Everyday people do not give a crap about the Web. Now, don’t get me wrong – they care about the information found there, but Google famously demonstrated that the average Joe doesn’t know the difference between a browser, a web site, and a search engine. People want to tell their computer what they want, and then get an answer. They don’t care one bit if that answer is streamed via HTTP and rendered in a web browser via HTML. They just want an answer. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt if they get that answer fast and in a fun, engaging way. You know, like, via a 99 cent app on your phone.
The iPhone trained people to use apps instead of web pages on their phones. The tablet Apple will release tomorrow will prove that apps’ superiority over web pages holds true for larger devices. It’s only logical that people eventually will use specialized apps in lieu of web pages on their full-sized home computers. Or will they? The answer is: it’s a red herring.
With powerful, portable devices like the iPhone, people will stop sitting down to get information. I’m not predicting the complete death of the home computer, but 20 years from now people will only sit down at a keyboard to do extended work. There is no long-term future for weather web sites, stock quote web sites, or perhaps even ecommerce sites. It just makes no logical sense. Remember when people had to sit, literally tethered to their desk to make a phone call? Seems pretty silly now, no?
Microsoft tried to render the web irrelevant by making it indistinguishable from the operating system (ActiveX!). Apple didn’t fall into that trap. Instead, they’re attacking the web by creating a superior distribution model for content – the same way they beat the unstoppable music-piracy juggernaut with the iTunes store.
Apple’s disdain for the web should be obvious:
- Aside from their own web site and “me.com”, Apple has never launched a web-based service
- The me.com launch was famously botched, indicating that Apple is not exactly awash with web engineering expertise
- iWeb. Look, people knocked FrontPage back in the day, but not since FrontPage was there a web authoring app that “gets” the web less than iWeb.
- Apple does not participate in “Web 2.0”. It has no Facebook Page (I was shocked to find that iTunes does), no Twitter account, no blog. Deep down, Apple doesn’t believe in Social Networking. They believe in enabling real human interaction. Remember Steve Jobs’ response to the Zune’s song sharing ability?
Microsoft tried to destroy the web because they were worried about losing sales. Apple is trying to destroy the web because they genuinely believe they can create a better experience, and they’re probably right. And if you think the web is too big a target for Apple to disrupt completely, think again – it only took Apple 6 years to effectively take over the century-plus-old music industry. The Internet has only been a commercial medium for 15 years.
If you’re a web developer wondering what this means for you, I think the takeaway is this: HTML and CSS are likely to be with us for many more years to come, because they are powerful technologies for easily organizing and rendering content. But where that HTML and CSS end up is going to be a much different place than where it is now. Keep your eyes open and your skills sharp.
All I can say about this is that unless you need to collaborate with other people, web apps DO suck and they ARE slow and awkward compared to native apps. This infatuation that people have with web apps will pass. Storing data in “the cloud” is great. But the future is what services like Dropbox are doing. It’s having data on the cloud AND on your computer(s). The web is best for sharing information, not for hosting EVERY SINGLE PART of an application.
“This infatuation that people have with web apps will pass.”
Ha ha ha ha. Try e.g. TiddlyWiki, a wiki that’s simply a local web page. Conventional applications began their slow death in 2004 with Gmail, all this kerfuffle is a small, though very troubling, blip in a long-term trend. If Apple fans allow themselves to be shut off from the open vibrant web in a maze of crapware icons, they have only themselves to blame.
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(edit: Gmail was 2004, not 1994
All I can say about this is that unless you need to collaborate with other people, web apps DO suck and they ARE slow and awkward compared to native apps. This infatuation that people have with web apps will pass. Storing data in “the cloud” is great. But the future is what services like Dropbox are doing. It’s having data on the cloud AND on your computer(s). The web is best for sharing information, not for hosting EVERY SINGLE PART of an application.
I see desperate Flash developers…
The inability of senior executives at Apple, to comprehend the importance of plug-ins like Silverlight and Flash, is like corporate suicide. These technologies are essential today for providing features that browsers cannot offer natively. They will be even more important in developing the next-generation of web products.
The web has changed, it’s become a rich application platform. Apple is already showing signs of being left behind.
Isn’t worrying that there are technologies ‘essential for the browsing experience’, but are not core technologies embedded natively in browsers?
I think Jobs indirectly wanted to show exactly this: if the web is a rich application platform, why there is just one contestant (flash player)? let’s bring on some competition, and cut off some contestant from my platform…
Conversely, I would argue that the splintering of mobile platforms makes the development of custom apps for each platform a tenuous model at best. With already 3 major platforms (iPhone, Android, and Blackberry) and with Nokia’s Maemo and Windows Mobile still (somewhat) in the game, development costs will skyrocket as we go from supporting 2 (possibly 3 if you’re so Linux-enlightened) platforms to now supporting at least 5. The web is, as it stands today, the *only* ubiquitous mobile platform and it will be very difficult for any one company to change that.
Adobe can’t do it with Flash (though they desperately want to) because Apple is blocking them.
Microsoft, RIM, Google, and Apple can’t do it because they don’t dominate the market to a point where their model can be “the standard.”
According to Cellular-news, via Wikipedia, there are 276,610,580 mobile phone users in the United States as of June 2009. According to Nielsen, there are 6.4 million iPhone users in the United States as of June 2009.
That means iPhone make up 2.3% of the total mobile phone market. I very much doubt that the iPhone has “taught” people anything. People with various smart phones often tend to forget that the vast majority of people out there still do not surf the web or use “apps” on their phones.
I am willing to bet the adoption rate of the iPad is much lower than that of the iPhone. If this really Apple’s intent, it will fail.
Great write up. It seems ironic that Apple’s strategy to push us to ‘apps’ is very similar to what Adobe has been allowing developers to do via AIR for a number of years. If you have an app that could benefit from running outside of the browser Adobe gives you the option of doing that, in a way that doesn’t lock you into a single OS.
Isn’t worrying that there are technologies ‘essential for the browsing experience’, but are not core technologies embedded natively in browsers?
I think Jobs indirectly wanted to show exactly this: if the web is a rich application platform, why there is just one contestant (flash player)? let’s bring on some competition, and cut off some contestant from my platform…