The Web will be just fine - Coexistance

Project 2 - The Internet

The article “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet” by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff (Wired, Features 18.09, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1) is an observation on the changing nature of traffic on the web. The central thesis of Anderson and Wolff’s article is that the World Wide Web (WWW) is dying out, and that proprietary applications are taking over. The article is making a point that the internet, a collection of computer networks using the Internet Protocol Suite, often referred to as TCP/IP, is (for the time being), an eternal medium for exchanging data. Anderson and Wolff take some basic usage data statistics and try to show that WWW traffic (IP Port 80 traffic of requests and services between web browsers and web servers on the Internet) is on the decline while smart phone applications, streaming media services, and other managed user experience sites like Facebook are ascending to become the dominant mediums on the Internet.

The article takes a look at the same core issue, the migration of network traffic from traditional web pages to purpose driven applications, from two perspectives. Chris Anderson takes the point of view that this industry change is driven by consumer demand for applications that integrate with their everyday lives. Michael Wolff makes the case that this change is industry driven, in an effort to gain greater control on the distribution of content on the Internet. This article graphically presents these two perspectives as arguments that come from polar opposites, with Chris Anderson’s view in white, and Michael’s in red (black and white was too obvious a cliché, I guess).

The article makes some interesting historical points and provides some interesting examples on both sides to bolster its arguments. While not explicitly referring to the OSI Model in the article, Anderson talks about the application layer, making the inferred distinction between the transport layer that delivers web traffic (TCP/IP) and what is going on behind the curtain at web sites to deliver the user experience. Wolff provides a good example of the ability of Apple (which Wolff simplifies as being the extension of a single person, CEO Steve Jobs) to integrate all of its media holdings to create a synergistic media experience.

The article makes a strong point about the difference in the central business model of the web (WWW traffic) verses the business model of Internet applications. The “build it and they will come” ethic of the web that has allowed Yahoo, Google, and many other sites to thrive also laid low many more web sites (pets.com, eToys.com, kibu.com, and other epic web failures). It turns out that you can’t create a business model on the simple idea that an idea can’t go wrong if you can just get enough customers (and the trend of web sites driven by the endless need to support search revenue with SEO to capture eyeballs isn’t helping the web either). Applications that are designed to support a transactional revenue stream are much more sustainable. By taking intensive control of the user experience, companies have greater stickiness to consumers. Applications, serving a direct consumer need, give companies a greater ability to charge higher margins and create reoccurring revenue.

One hole in the main thesis of this article, missing from both sets of arguments/observations, is that there is a quantitative difference between the amount of web traffic generated by traditional web sites, and this new generation of application driven TCP/IP traffic. Web design promotes a user experience that mostly involves requests from a user’s web browser for information. This request drive traffic pattern is relatively low hour by hour because it is driven and limited by the end user’s browsing behavior. Application behavior is different in nature, involving much more automated presentation of rich data to an end user. This presentation of data is often in the form of streaming media (music from Pandora, streaming video from Netflix, etc.) or in the form of synchronizing and schema data for games (all of the data necessary to connect into a common experience for World of Warcraft players who are in the same virtual space interacting with each other). This difference between the leaner nature of web client-server interaction and the consistently weightier nature of application traffic skews the central argument of the paper. A reader of this article could walk away thinking the death of the web is a certainty, but this skew in the data covers the fact that the web may be healthy enough to coexist with apps for the long term.

As with many Wired articles, this article takes an interesting but simplified premise, and drains it of every bit of exposition possible. Unless you have a vital interest that is tied to traditional web services (Adobe maybe?), this evolution from web to application isn’t as impactful as the article would have you believe. The web will continue to survive just fine as the proliferation of mobile devices with a browser continue to access resources such as Wikipedia, government web sites, and countless blogs, articles, and discussion sites. The more interesting article would have been the impact on our behavior and our lives of the control applications will have in the future as we trade privacy for convenience. Spending the currency of privacy will have a fundamental change in the way that we all interact with companies.