Can’t Catch Me

The future of software is on the web. That’s what they keep telling me. I just smile, and say “I don’t think so. There will always be compelling technologies on the desktop.” I believe this, but I admit it carries an odor of blind loyalty to my comfort zone.

People who argue the other side have latched on to a few admittedly stunning aspects of the web, and they seem to believe that these charming characteristics alone ensure a course for long-term victory over all others. These attributes include:

Cross-platform. You can run a web app on any computer that has a capable browser.

Ubiquity. You don’t need to be near your computer to run a web app. You just “log in.”

Instant updates. No need to coerce customers to update, just change the code on the server and they’re quietly updated to the latest running code.

Open, standard technologies. You have control over and access to most of the source code at the heart of your application.

Attractive indeed. If you imagine a world where the sum of all things you can do with a computer is exactly matched, and locked down for all time with what you can do inside a browser, then the arguments for the web are persuasive. Why write for a specific platform when you can write for all platforms at once and gain the other advantages as well?

The error is in disregarding the many unmatchable attractions of “the desktop.” When I say desktop, I mean any platform that provides applications with more features than the standard web. iPhones are “the desktop.” As are Android, Palm Pre, Macs, PCs, and Linux. All offer features and functionality above and beyond what you can do on the web itself.

But the web can do a lot!, you cry, and point me to examples of ingenuity such as 280 Slides, the flagship proof-of-concept from 280 North’s impressive library for implementing web apps in a way that is reminiscent of programming in Objective-C. What these people are doing is mind-blowingly impressive, and if I decided to write a web app for some reason, I would probably use technologies like these.

But if I want to write a truly great app, it has to be a desktop app. And this will be true forever, or until there is no difference between the web and the desktop. I grant you, if the web becomes the desktop, something I find very unlikely, then the web will have in fact won by default.

Anything You Can Do…

Companies like 280 North are investing years of engineering time into a necessary pre-requisite for web-app domination: bringing the web’s capabilities up to approximately what the desktop offers. I quipped on Core Intuition that “Web 2009 = Windows 95”. It’s a play on an old bumper-sticker from Apple, that poked fun at Windows for finally having “caught up” to Macintosh’s 1989 feature set, in 1995. The amount of work done over the past few years on web app technologies is staggering, but when you take a step back, they celebrate victories over things we have taken for granted for years on the desktop. Things like drag and drop and animation are at least possible on the web. Other niceties such as inter-application scriptability would require a total overhaul of how web browsers behave.

The problem with the game of catch-up, is you only ever win if your target is moving slower than you are, or better yet if they stop completely. All desktop platforms are innovating to offer developers greater and greater capabilities that peer into the future of what your high-powered CPUs, GPUs, and peripheral hardware makes possible. Meanwhile, most web platforms are just trying to catch up.

And catching up is hard for many reasons, not least of which that they have no idea where the desktop is going. None of us do, and Apple’s announcement yesterday of the iPad is a great example of this. The goal of a “vaguely Mac/PC-like application interaction environment on the web” is thrown a curveball when desktop vendors such as Apple are constantly picking up the goal, brushing it off, and setting down again on a completely different path you’ll have to now forge a trail to.

It’s an unfair fight. We know exactly what the web can do, and we have a good idea of what it plans to do, thanks to its (laudable) open standards. But none of us has any idea what the next iPad, iPhone, Wii, Xbox, TomTom, whatever, will do. Don’t get me wrong: the web is excellent at innovating, but it innovates primarily for publishing and social interaction. It doesn’t innovate on desktop UI or device integration, the very areas where brilliant desktop applications shine. And it does innovate, as I have already suggested, in the art of catching up.

Anything you can run in a web browser can also run inside a desktop app, thanks to the modular embedding capabilities of WebKit on the Mac and Internet Explorer on the PC. However, it should be obvious that the inverse is not true. When something truly innovating and mind-blowing happens on the web, I can drop it into a WebView on my Mac and make it a part of my desktop experience. When something mind-blowing happens on the desktop, you can bet you’ll have people scurrying to painstakingly imitate it on the web. It takes a lot of work, and a lot of time, and sometimes it’s not precisely even possible. But eventually they will come up with something reasonably close.

I imagine in 5 or 10 years the web will have caught up to something resembling how desktops behave today. But I can’t even begin to imagine what we’ll have at our fingertips on the desktop, by then. iPad? We ain’t seen nothing yet.