Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet

[Karen]

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.


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.