After the first few paragraphs of content, the segue about 'bots' is strange -- unless it's not. Really this article is a thinly-veiled promotion of the idea of

After the first few paragraphs of content, the segue about 'bots' is strange -- unless it's not. Really this article is a thinly-veiled promotion of the idea of chatbots, which isn't surprising given the publisher's primary business is CRM and chat products and whatnot. But it's also the Last New Frontier, because as the comScore charts show, most people spend their time in the top 3 apps -- which are probably the same or come out of the same pool of half a dozen. So the only way to push one's own content is to participate in a popular app maker's content ecosystem (FB Instant Articles, Snapchat Discover, myriad chatbot platforms for various messengers), or participate in a "open web" 'discovery' ecosystem (Google Search -> Google AMP). So really the article's content seems to imply that the future isn't browsers (in the traditional sense of 'here's a user agent you can navigate to arbitrary URLs') after all, it's content aggregators who provide windows to -- and framing around -- content. This point has been made a few times before, most notably by Paul Kinlan of Google [1], so it's a pretty safe bet it's actually the case. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12206846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12206846