The Web Is Dead? A Debate

While there’s no question that both Facebook and the mobile app ecosystem provide clear challenges to “the web,” the idea that the browser front end was ever the key to the web’s dominance is so, well, 1995, from the days when Netscape thought that the “webtop” would displace the desktop. But the competitive action has always been on the internet as transport, with data-driven services as the back end.

Back when I put on my first conference, the Perl Conference, in 1997, I was already talking about how the internet was becoming a vast repository of programmable services, that screen scraping and overloaded URLs were pointing towards a future internet operating system. And when I put on my “Building the Internet Operating System” conference in 2002, I was already focusing on how Peer-to-Peer distribution, distributed computation, and web services were pointing forward to something much bigger than we’d seen before.

And in 2004, when we rechristened this whole thing “Web 2.0,” I was very clear that “Data is the Intel Inside,” that what we were talking about was an internet operating system, whose subsystems were data systems like identity, location, payment, advertising, media repositories, and product ids.

And sure enough, “web sites” like Google, but also now Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, PayPal, LinkedIn and many others, have been quietly building those enormous data back ends that drive their web sites, but more importantly, also drive a vast array of web services. Google maps in the browser is still Google maps, with all the intelligence, all the deep data layers, that make it a success on either front-end.