point.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/
The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet
* By Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff Email Author
* August 17, 2010 |
* 9:00 am |
* Wired September 2010
*
Sources: Cisco estimates based on CAIDA publications, Andrew Odlyzko
Sources: Cisco estimates based on CAIDA publications, Andrew Odlyzko
Skull
The Web Is Dead? A Debate
How the Web Wins
How Do Native Apps and Web Apps Compare?
Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as
simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching
and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new
paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael
Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web
for more promising (and profitable) pastures.
Who's to Blame:
Us
As much as we love the open, unfettered Web, we're abandoning it for
simpler, sleeker services that just work.
by Chris Anderson
You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that's one
app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York
Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a
podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through
RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps.
At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to
Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix's
streaming service.
You've spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are
not alone.
This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the
most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the
wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for
transport but not the browser for display. It's driven primarily by
the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it's a world
Google can't crawl, one where HTML doesn't rule. And it's the world
that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they're
rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms
often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen
comes to them, they don't have to go to the screen). The fact that
it's easier for companies to make money on these platforms only
cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the
culmination of the digital revolution.
A decade ago, the ascent of the Web browser as the center of the
computing world appeared inevitable. It seemed just a matter of time
before the Web replaced PC application software and reduced operating
systems to a "poorly debugged set of device drivers," as Netscape
cofounder Marc Andreessen famously said. First Java, then Flash, then
Ajax, then HTML5 — increasingly interactive online code — promised to
put all apps in the cloud and replace the desktop with the webtop.
Open, free, and out of control.
But there has always been an alternative path, one that saw the Web as
a worthy tool but not the whole toolkit. In 1997, Wired published a
now-infamous "Push!" cover story, which suggested that it was time to
"kiss your browser goodbye." The argument then was that "push"
technologies such as PointCast and Microsoft's Active Desktop would
create a "radical future of media beyond the Web."
"Sure, we'll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and
telegrams, don't we? But the center of interactive media —
increasingly, the center of gravity of all media — is moving to a post-
HTML environment," we promised nearly a decade and half ago. The
examples of the time were a bit silly — a "3-D furry-muckers VR space"
and "headlines sent to a pager" — but the point was altogether
prescient: a glimpse of the machine-to-machine future that would be
less about browsing and more about getting.
Who's to Blame:
Them
Chaos isn't a business model. A new breed of media moguls is bringing
order — and profits — to the digital world.
by Michael Wolff
An amusing development in the past year or so — if you regard post-
Soviet finance as amusing — is that Russian investor Yuri Milner has,
bit by bit, amassed one of the most valuable stakes on the Internet:
He's got 10 percent of Facebook. He's done this by undercutting
traditional American VCs — the Kleiners and the Sequoias who would, in
days past, insist on a special status in return for their early
investment. Milner not only offers better terms than VC firms, he sees
the world differently. The traditional VC has a portfolio of Web
sites, expecting a few of them to be successes — a good metaphor for
the Web itself, broad not deep, dependent on the connections between
sites rather than any one, autonomous property. In an entirely
different strategic model, the Russian is concentrating his bet on a
unique power bloc. Not only is Facebook more than just another Web
site, Milner says, but with 500 million users it's "the largest Web
site there has ever been, so large that it is not a Web site at all."
According to Compete, a Web analytics company, the top 10 Web sites
accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006,
and about 75 percent in 2010. "Big sucks the traffic out of small,"
Milner says. "In theory you can have a few very successful individuals
controlling hundreds of millions of people. You can become big fast,
and that favors the domination of strong people."
Milner sounds more like a traditional media mogul than a Web
entrepreneur. But that's exactly the point. If we're moving away from
the open Web, it's at least in part because of the rising dominance of
businesspeople more inclined to think in the all-or-nothing terms of
traditional media than in the come-one-come-all collectivist
utopianism of the Web. This is not just natural maturation but in many
ways the result of a competing idea — one that rejects the Web's
ethic, technology, and business models. The control the Web took from
the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little
rethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back.
This development — a familiar historical march, both feudal and
corporate, in which the less powerful are sapped of their reason for
being by the better resourced, organized, and efficient — is perhaps
the rudest shock possible to the leveled, porous, low-barrier-to-entry
ethos of the Internet Age. After all, this is a battle that seemed
fought and won — not just toppling newspapers and music labels but
also AOL and Prodigy and anyone who built a business on the idea that
a curated experience would beat out the flexibility and freedom of the
Web.
Illustration: Dirk Fowler
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