Session slide based on Chris Anderson's (Wired) argument: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1

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
The Web Is Dead(?)
MAC129 MED102
Sources: Wired, Cisco estimates based on CAIDA publications, Andrew Odlyzko

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Web vs Internet
 Internet = infrastructure
 Web = World Wide Web (www.browser.com)

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Chris Anderson

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 “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.”
 Anderson, 2010

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The App Economy?
 Increase in semi-closed platforms
 The ‘walled-garden’
 Google cannot crawl this Internet
 HTML

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The App Economy?
 Increase in semi-closed platforms
 The ‘walled-garden’
 Google cannot crawl this Internet
 HTML
 What about HTML5?

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The Internet, but not the Web

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1997
 “kiss your browser goodbye”
 “radical future of media beyond the Web”
 PointCast
 Microsoft’s Active Desktop

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 “The Web is, after all, just one of many applications
that exist on the Internet, which uses the IP and TCP
protocols to move packets around. This architecture
— not the specific applications built on top of it —
is the revolution. Today the content you see in your
browser — largely HTML data delivered via the http
protocol on port 80 — accounts for less than a
quarter of the traffic on the Internet … and it’s
shrinking.”
 Anderson, 2010

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 1920 – 186 major railroads in the US
 2010 - 7

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 1894 – 6000+ independent phone companies
 1939 – AT&T dominates with 4/5s of phones

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 Early 1900s – hundreds of small companies
 Late 1920s – 16 companies owned 75% of market

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Tethered devices?
 “It is a mistake to think of the Web browser as the
apex of the PC’s evolution”
 2008, p125

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Tethered devices?
 Google’s Chromebook?

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Metcalfe’s Law
 The value of a network increases in
proportion to the square of connections
 Winner takes all

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Walled Gardens
 AOL
 iTunes
 Facebook

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‘dumb network’
 TCP/IP routing
 The ‘end-to-end’ principle
 Resend | reload | buffer | increase
capacity

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Google Maps Mobile

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The layers principle
1. Content layer
2. Logical
(application) layer
3. Physical layer

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The app economy: freemium over free

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The web as an app?
 HTML5?
 Open?
 Flexible?
 Mobile web optimized?

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Generativity
 “The prospect of tethered appliances and software
as service … permits major regulatory intrusions to
be implemented as minor technical adjustments to
code or requests to service providers.”
 2008: p125

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The web is dead?
 What will the future be for the Internet?
 What will Google do?
 What will Facebook do?
 What will Apple do?

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 CNBC news interview with Michael Wolffe

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 Henry Blodget interviews Anderson

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The Future: HTML5?

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The Future: HTML5?
 “So native apps – providing they are non-game apps
like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc – are
anachronistic. They are more client/server than
web. We took client/server out to the paddock and
calmly shot it in the head many moons ago, didn't
we, so logic suggests we'll repeat that with native
apps on smartphones”
 Matthew Baxter-Reynolds, 2011

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Is the Web really dead?
 Apps
 1960s: On mainframes
 1980s: Moved to PCs
 1990s: PC logic moved to server (client/server)
 2000s: User interface moved to server (web-based
intranet)
 Then comes the iPhone
 Back to client/server
 Driven by consumers…

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Questions
 To what extent would you say you used the web
more (or less) than software apps to access the
internet?
 List a few of the ways you connect to the Internet
 Do you think the Web (browser) experience is dying
out, and what are the major factors behind the
current trends?

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Sources
 Chris Anderson & Michael Wolff, 2010, ‘The Web is
Dead. Long Live the Internet’ via Wired.
 Matthew Baxter-Reynolds, 2011, ‘Will HTML5
replace native apps? It might: here's how to figure
out when’ via guardian.co.uk
 Jonathon Zittrain, 2008, The Future of the Internet
and How to Stop it, London: Allen Lane. Available as
a senuti.

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Images
 Extra Medium, 2007, Railroad to the Hills
 SlipStreamJC, 2006, plane in cables
 theJGJ, 2010, electricity and unconsciousness
 Harshlight, 2009, Monopoly in the Park
 Recursion_see_recursion, 2006, Walled garden
 Darren Hester, 2010, CAT-5 Network Cable