Technology: Forrester Wrongly Predicts the Death of Web Pages

The Cloud has dominated much of the discussion and direction of computing over the last few years.  Now Forrester says that the clouds are bringing  ‘thunderstorms’.  The cloud combined with mobile is creating a new infrastructure that is dramatically changing our relationship with the Internet.

At a conference on the Internet in Paris last month, George Colony, chairman and CEO of Forrester Research, outlined ‘thunderstorms’ that are moving in and which Forrester expects to dramatically change the computing landscape.  One of the thunderstorms is the ‘death of the web’.

Death of the ‘Web’. More accurately, death of web-browser based Internet pages.  Instead of using your browser, Forrester envisions users primarily interacting across the Internet with apps.  Colony said that “The web is not the internet; it’s just a software architecture we decided to put on the internet.  Like its software predecessors, the web will eventually be replaced and we think App Internet is the best direction for the next step. It’s faster, simpler and offers a better internet experience.”  Colony is calling this next wave of computing the ‘App Internet’.

It is certainly clear that Internet-aware applications are becoming a big part of the Internet and mobile industry.  Forrester notes that the ‘app market’ is currently around $2.2 billion and is growing annually at a rate of 85%.  Colony notes that companies are beginning to move development funds away from Internet web page development to creating downloadable applications.

Is Colony right about this?  Could apps really replace the Internet world of web pages?  It seems unlikely.  Apps are cool, and we can expect to see a lot more of them, but that doesn’t mean that internet web pages will go away any time soon.  It’s hard to imagine how a collection of stand-alone applications could replace a knowledge base of millions of interlinking web sites.  Applications present silos of information.  There is no standard for how data is presented within an app user interface.  Search engines will have a steep challenge trying to read and index the data presented in thousands or millions of applications, each of which presents data in it’s own unique format.

That’s not to say that applications won’t have their place.  Applications have the potential to replace today’s web pages that support frequently recurring Internet operations.  I use apps now for reading news from sources like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New Scientist.  An app for doing Internet banking with my bank makes sense too.  But I really don’t want to have to download a new application every time that I am doing research on a particular company or product, but maybe I am not the ‘typical’ internet user.

Colony told Forbes that “Google, despite its control of Android, is in trouble.  In an App world, Google’s core model – search advertising – breaks down.  Facebook also is in danger, due to their reliance on low-cost ads.  They don’t even have an iPad app. And Web-based software as a service providers likewise are in grave danger.  The smart players in the sector – including Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff – are moving to the App Internet as fast as they can.”

But Colony doesn’t mention HTML5.  HTML5 has the potential to bring the world of applications to browsers.  In the world of HTML5, existing web sites and pages will happily coexist with highly interactive HTML5 browser-based applications.  While HTML5 applications may not currently be able to match the capabilities of applications built to run natively on mobile devices, that capability gap is expected to narrow.  It seems more likely that long-term the requiem will not be for the web, but for the ‘App Internet’ which was built on silo-ed native applications.