Wired: The Web Is Dead

This ought to get your attention: “The Web is dead,” Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff declare in a pair of complementary articles in Wired. “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,” Anderson explains. In this new landscape, the app is preferred to the browser, especially as customers shift from PCs to mobile wireless devices. “Because the screens are smaller, such mobile traffic tends to be driven by specialty software, mostly apps, designed for a single purpose. For the sake of the optimized experience on mobile devices, users forgo the general-purpose browser. They use the Net, but not the Web. Fast beats flexible.” Wolff writes that “The Web of countless entrepreneurs [is] being overshadowed by the single entrepreneur-mogul-visionary model, a ruthless paragon of everything the Web was not: rigid standards, high design, centralized control.” He concludes, “We are returning to a world that already exists—one in which we chase the transformative effects of music and film instead of our brief (relatively speaking) flirtation with the transformative effects of the Web.”