Part of the effect that the Web specifically has had over the past decade is to adjust the general personal computing public to the idea that programs and files

Part of the effect that the Web specifically has had over the past decade is to adjust the general personal computing public to the idea that programs and files are more ephemeral than they were, say, 10 years earlier. We don't really worry about "will such and such computer be compatible with my [whatever] files?" as much as we used to. This is actually quite big. What it means is that any system designed for personal computing needs to have one key program in order to be truly usable: a web browser. Now, how does that get us past the Web or to the "next" web? Well, if a web browser is all you need, we can go about designing personal computing architectures that are very different from the current offerings. This means we can experiment with new programming languages and environments. Imagine making a computer optimized for something like a Smalltalk system. Sure it would be hard to catch on at first, but if the system came with a web browser and internet access, you'd be ahead of the game.