The OS Matters More Than Ever
HTML5 could turn into a security nightmare. It can become the pirated Windows XP of public standards. Any internet service provider and switch out there can rewrite the code into something else. Lots of people run Windows XP inside a virtual machine because the software they use is so rotten it only works on a subset of Windows. So people then replace it with web apps that only run on a subset of Internet Explorer. And then replace that with something they did not write themselves because they now understand just how useless the development department really is. And this is why the web takes over more and more. The web is better than massive incompetence. And you get collaboration and off-site access for free.
The idea that the web is "the next OS" is sort of silly. The fact that nuclear power-plants and undersea pipelines are a dependency is not even a topic on popular Web 2.0 blogs. The day when people sit on Mars and check their email you can guarantee it is not a "web app" as the Web 2.0 hipsters define it. It might be made in HTML5 and be a HTML5 application, but it is basically a desktop application running inside another desktop application. Because as we learn how to use HTML5 we learn just how important security and privacy really is. And slowly HTML5 becomes a desktop application again. Because software is all about control. Real or imaginary. Hiding code on a server in Utah and providing a JSON API to the "flush toilet" function will not be practical. And developers knows this and Google Native Client, HTML5 Database and Local Storage is the result.
Even if we encrypt almost everything, there will always be leaks in the network transfer. Flash cookies, media caches, DRM, static resources, payment, social engineering, evil corporations or governments. If we choose to go the app store route with web apps on the side we simply assume we are safe. It is like a door locked by other people you never see. Not that I am alluding that anti-virus software is even remotely user-friendly or anything. The desktop lets you analyze if the Chinese government is stealing your pornography collection for some reason. Google Chrome OS probably only tells Google HQ about it and then they issue a press release if the problem affects their operational integrity.
The rise of web applications is really the rise of usage statistics. A more draconian version of what Microsoft tried to sell off as software activation. Basically the web app is digital restriction/rights management for lazy developers. Connecting your software to a credit card 24/7. And this is also why young people almost never pay for online services. They do not have credit cards. And this is why advertising is the big marked. Because advertising is the micro-payments tree in the business platform forest.
People use Linux and BSD because they want an alternative to Windows and OS X. A public standard they can deploy software to. And Google, Yahoo and many others where founded on open source because open source software made it much cheaper to create large computing farms that crawled the web. Open source is a big win for small players and people who just want to learn. You no longer need connections to get hold of a decent compiler. Microsoft .NET WPF, Linux GTK and Apple Cocoa are not features. They are quirks designed to lock you into the platform. And the big nemesis on the web app is not bandwidth or new desktop paradigms. It is latency. Because "slow" is 0,5 seconds.
The app store, the web app and Apple iPad are the new Sony Playstation 3's or Xbox 360's. They are what replaces AmigaOS, HPUX, Z/OS, Irix, Solaris and many other desktop and console systems. Because now everything is a virtual supercomputer because of the network. Today’s "user experience" (UX) is 20 years old. But people who sell stuff tell you it is brand new. Because then they can charge more. If the web is extremely powerful, you need something that matches it and protects you from it. You need a better operating system. Because virtual machines like Vmware, Parallels, VirtualBox and Xen tells us everything we need to know. We can not run the web inside a virtual machine to support the old API's that we used in our software. But someone is probably working on it.
The desktop wins because we can run the old version of something.
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