2 ms·

That 'for some reason' that made the web win was one thing: search. The user interface of being able to type a few characters or a word in the arena of what yo

That 'for some reason' that made the web win was one thing: search. The user interface of being able to type a few characters or a word in the arena of what you want and to be actively doing what you wanted to be doing a moment later is something people very much want. And desktops never provided it, so web won. It's as simple as that.

Silhouette 9y ago
I suggest that there was something else just as important: desktop apps never solved the "convenient installation and maintenance" problem. Even after many years of Windows dominating the desktop, installing an application on Microsoft's platform typically means finding an installer from a reputable source, waiting around while it runs, answering all kinds of questions you mostly don't care about but that will catch you out if you do forgot to check/uncheck something significant, fixing (or not) whatever incompatibilities it has with other software you might remember installing last year, hoping it doesn't crash your video driver or corrupt your files because your LAN connectivity dropped out for a few seconds or screw up your hard drive with its poorly implemented and malware-like copy protection technology, two days later getting your 57th non-standard prompt this week to update something using your 57th non-standard update mechanism this week because of $SCARY_SECURITY_WARNING, wondering whether the result of that will actually be the same as just installing the new version from their web site, wondering whether you can move your ludicrously expensive business software to your new PC when the current one's hard drive fails, never quite knowing where your important data is and whether your application follows proper Windows standards so you can at least back your data up, and then having endless problems because you once uninstalled an old version of something vaguely related that didn't clean up properly. Here's the equivalent with a web app: Go to web site and use the software. Here's the equivalent with a mobile app and app store: Tap app store icon. Search for software and tap install button. Use app. If Microsoft had managed to address this most fundamental set of requirements somewhere in the first 15 or 20 years of Windows' life, I still believe it would be the dominant tech business today, instead of slowly sliding towards irrelevance as it uses up its war chest failing to take advantage of one new trend after another.
- pdimitar 9y ago
  Completely agreed! And Microsoft is wasting opportunities even today. Windows is still very widely used yet they fail to capitalize on this. What was their solution? Advertisements! They lost a lot of user capital, so to speak, due to this. To this day, you have to install paid software like Sandboxie if you want a macOS / FreeBSD-style-jails environment where apps can't meddle with one another (or the OS itself). "But but but... it's gonna break this office's 20 year-old setup!" -- this is a very overstated danger. Microsoft has been really good at backwards compatibility. Sooner or later though, some sacrifices have to be made. If your accounting software relies on the ability to write to your entire disk, maybe it has to go. (Furthermore, I've successfully migrated one office's "database" and shared sheets to a dedicated small NAS machine and simply remounted their network dirs again to point to the new location. Took 15 minutes for an office with 5 machines.) Several weeks ago there was a small discussion here in HN about OS-es morphing into a bunch of services you can use in a highly efficient manner. Of course most people scratched it off as "might break too much legacy software". Well, sure it could. Shouldn't be a reason why we shouldn't start and experiment along the way. I am sure the dangers are overstated anyway. Everybody is like "nooooo, the sky is gonna fall!" and nobody is actually willing to try.

Silhouette 9y ago

I suggest that there was something else just as important: desktop apps never solved the "convenient installation and maintenance" problem. Even after many years of Windows dominating the desktop, installing an application on Microsoft's platform typically means finding an installer from a reputable source, waiting around while it runs, answering all kinds of questions you mostly don't care about but that will catch you out if you do forgot to check/uncheck something significant, fixing (or not) whatever incompatibilities it has with other software you might remember installing last year, hoping it doesn't crash your video driver or corrupt your files because your LAN connectivity dropped out for a few seconds or screw up your hard drive with its poorly implemented and malware-like copy protection technology, two days later getting your 57th non-standard prompt this week to update something using your 57th non-standard update mechanism this week because of $SCARY_SECURITY_WARNING, wondering whether the result of that will actually be the same as just installing the new version from their web site, wondering whether you can move your ludicrously expensive business software to your new PC when the current one's hard drive fails, never quite knowing where your important data is and whether your application follows proper Windows standards so you can at least back your data up, and then having endless problems because you once uninstalled an old version of something vaguely related that didn't clean up properly. Here's the equivalent with a web app: Go to web site and use the software. Here's the equivalent with a mobile app and app store: Tap app store icon. Search for software and tap install button. Use app. If Microsoft had managed to address this most fundamental set of requirements somewhere in the first 15 or 20 years of Windows' life, I still believe it would be the dominant tech business today, instead of slowly sliding towards irrelevance as it uses up its war chest failing to take advantage of one new trend after another.

pdimitar 9y ago
Completely agreed! And Microsoft is wasting opportunities even today. Windows is still very widely used yet they fail to capitalize on this. What was their solution? Advertisements! They lost a lot of user capital, so to speak, due to this. To this day, you have to install paid software like Sandboxie if you want a macOS / FreeBSD-style-jails environment where apps can't meddle with one another (or the OS itself). "But but but... it's gonna break this office's 20 year-old setup!" -- this is a very overstated danger. Microsoft has been really good at backwards compatibility. Sooner or later though, some sacrifices have to be made. If your accounting software relies on the ability to write to your entire disk, maybe it has to go. (Furthermore, I've successfully migrated one office's "database" and shared sheets to a dedicated small NAS machine and simply remounted their network dirs again to point to the new location. Took 15 minutes for an office with 5 machines.) Several weeks ago there was a small discussion here in HN about OS-es morphing into a bunch of services you can use in a highly efficient manner. Of course most people scratched it off as "might break too much legacy software". Well, sure it could. Shouldn't be a reason why we shouldn't start and experiment along the way. I am sure the dangers are overstated anyway. Everybody is like "nooooo, the sky is gonna fall!" and nobody is actually willing to try.