8 ms·

The Web is the Next Platform (1995)

171 points by spencerwgreene 7y ago

kylek 7y ago
This is gold >> My nightmare scenario is that the Web grows into a rich application platform in an operating system-neutral way, and then a company like Siemens or Matsushita comes out with a $500 “WebMachine” that attaches to a TV. This WebMachine will let the customer do all the cool Internet stuff, plus manage home finances (all the storage is at the server side), and play games. When faced with the choice between a $500 box (RISC CPU, 4-8Mb RAM, no hard disk, …) and a $2KPentium/P6 Windows machine, the 2/3rds of homes that don’t have a PC may find the $500 machine pretty attractive!
- jacobush 7y ago
  Very prescient iPad / smart phone prediction there.
  - pvg 7y ago
    It's a sensible prediction for a product developed and launched within a year of this memo being written and acquired by Microsoft within two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV
    - jacobush 7y ago
      I'm thinking on a higher level - what we have is exactly that the data is on servers and that people do not have control over their own hardware. And that the cheap hardware is good enough.
      - pvg 7y ago
        I'm not following how that's different from WebTV. The memo predicts a product like WebTV and that product materializes almost instantly. In the enterprise space, 'thin client' was already every second word out of Larry Ellison's mouth.
        majormajor 7y ago
        > When faced with the choice between a $500 box (RISC CPU, 4-8Mb RAM, no hard disk, …) and a $2KPentium/P6 Windows machine, the 2/3rds of homes that don’t have a PC may find the $500 machine pretty attractive! WebTV wasn't the compelling product the author was concerned about. The open internet and more open hardware won then (to MS's benefit, for the author). But the modern phone is that more compelling alternative.
        pvg 7y ago
        There are a lot of things that turned out to be more compelling than WebTV but predicting WebTV doesn't make the author 'prescient' about them either. The claim was about the prescience not the compellingness.
        majormajor 7y ago
        The prescient bit to me was "the web could displace windows if it becomes full featured and there's a compelling alternative form factor to the PC." Tons of people predicted webTv-like systems, but predicting MS losing power was much less common.
        notahacker 7y ago
        tbf loads of people predicted MS would lose power in the nineties. They just thought it would be due to desktop Linux
        pvg 7y ago
        Ok but the comment I was responding it did not say that. As to the MS thing, I'm not sure that's all that accurate either. It's certainly striking that someone wrote this and presented it at a high level within Microsoft when they did. But it also isn't that far from the way the future of the web was framed outside of Microsoft. If anything, it's a reminder of the outsized role Microsoft used to play just in 'mindshare'. A great deal of discussion about the internet and the web revolved around how it might affect Microsoft, how it might be an opening for (or not) for Microsoft competitors and how Microsoft would respond. I don't think either Google or Apple today loom quite as large in people's perceptions.
      - pjc50 7y ago
        What the original author was worried about was a world where it was no longer the case that 99% of consumers had to pay OEM license fees to Microsoft to do these things. And by and large that came to pass - the web is a free platform.
  - giantrobot 7y ago
    Web appliances are a far cry from tablets and smartphones. Those are both basically the exact opposite of a web appliance. They're network connected and can store data remotely but they have significant client side power. They also have significant local storage, at least compared to web appliances. The old web appliance concept was an extremely low powered device with no local storage. It had just enough power and storage to run a browser. The concept is more like a Chromebook/Chrometop than a tablet or smartphone. The web appliance concept was predicated on some early to mid 90s assumptions about technology trends: 1. Storage was expensive so just burn everything into a ROM. Saving data wouldn't be a thing as you'd bookmark sites or post data to websites. 2. The Pentium (and associated support chips) was expensive and would stay expensive. 3. The web would basically consist of static images and text. Input would be done with POSTs from form controls. 4. The web wouldn't adopt any vendor specific technologies and plug-ins won't exist. With these predicates some low powered RISC SoC running a browser would have been a decent appliance. WebTV and the Audrey weren't terrible products, they weren't great but also not terrible.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      Yes, but still not seeing the forest for all the trees. Yes, a phone has substantial computing power - compared to old technology. But is has nothing in storage or processing power against the data centers of Netflix, Facebook and Google. It's very thin in relative terms. Indeed, even native apps go to almost comical lengths to not use the CPU on the phone. Granted, they use them but for inconsequential things like eye candy. Voice recognition and "your" social graph etc is on the remote server. It's almost like there is a law that nothing of importance must be computed on the local device.
      - zozbot234 7y ago
        > Indeed, even native apps go to almost comical lengths to not use the CPU on the phone. This is needed in order to save battery life. But Netflix/FB/Google do not have "substantial" processing power per user. They're providing a centralized service to a very large userbase, and that comes with a requirement to economize on both compute and storage.
- outside1234 7y ago
  Also a good prediction for the crash in PC prices and the emergence of "webbooks"
- mellow2020 7y ago
  And this is a quote from Howard Rheingold: > You have to remember that in democratic societies citizens talking with each other is very important. We've lost a lot of that with the mass media. Now we have an opportunity for citizens to create their own communications with each other. So when these big deals with the big companies and the big governments carve up this new territory, I feel it's very important that we keep a kind of "social green belt", that we keep the ability for citizens to talk amongst each other. -- "The Computer Chronicles - The Internet (1993)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=22m14s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=22m14s
- wmf 7y ago
  A lot of thin clients came out in the 1990s and they were garbage. Web browsers are ridiculously inefficient (10x or more cycles to draw similar UI), yet thin clients had something like 1/10th the performance and 1/4th the RAM so the net performance would be 20x-100x worse than a PC for 1/4th the price. WebTV was kind of an exception to this; it was very fast due to the split browser architecture and putting very little content on the screen. IMO their amazing engineering was wasted on the low end of the market. VNC/Sun Ray was a much better idea, but only within a LAN.
  - kyuudou 7y ago
    What became TippingPoint put out an Internet Appliance similarly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener
- nomel 7y ago
  Could this be what MS has in mind for the Xbox Series X?
  - remir 7y ago
    Also the WebTV/MSN TV before it: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/MSN_TV https://www.wikiwand.com/en/MSN_TV
codenamepod 7y ago
This blog looks strange on a mobile.
- ci5er 7y ago
  Best comment evar!
johnchristopher 7y ago
It's incredible how it is visionary, articulated and spot-on and yet: > Once we have market and mind share on the Web with our products, we can take a leadership role in expanding and shaping the Web. They still want to strangle and submit the thing to their will and their will only.
- enos_feedler 7y ago
  So did this role end up in the hands of Google?
  - moonchild 7y ago
    More or less. Microsoft tried, but they didn't spend enough time in the Embrace phase for it to work out. Google, meanwhile, has spent long enough in the Extend phase they they barely need to move on (though they are starting to now).
    - echelon 7y ago
      > Extend phase Chrome, AMP, "improved" HTML standards, platformization...
osrec 7y ago
>> If Microsoft is to influence the Web, we must have broad, standards-based Web support in our products — we have to be the product supplier of choice for all key existing Web technologies — clients, servers, and publishing tools, at a minimum. I honestly feel lack of this is what killed IE in the eyes of developers.
- uk_programmer 7y ago
  What killed IE (I am not a IE hater) is the amount of extra work you had to invest to get a site to work. I've recently done some work that had to work with versions of IE9-11. I consider myself pretty good with writing front end code that will work with IE and there are many gotchas that I had forgotten about. The debugger is painful to use even on IE11.
  - osrec 7y ago
    I think that's the broad, standards based support that they were missing!
  - computerex 7y ago
    The debugger in IE11 is so painful to use. It's an absolute nightmare. It takes forever to launch, it freezes, freezes the whole browser, I don't understand how it's acceptable for it to be so sluggish when running on a top of the line development workstation. The app I work on has to support IE11 and it's easily the worst part of the job. Often times regressions are made because someone accidentally used some js keyword/feature that's not supported. The build takes forever because of IE, and so there is a flag IE_BUILD that's false most of the times until someone has to test in IE at which point they turn it on and wait for 10 mins for the thing to build. We had to implement theming, and for every other browser we used CSS variables but for IE we had to implement a hacky/complicated solution where we compiled customer specific CSS files. In short, IE sucks and I wish it'd die.
    - uk_programmer 7y ago
      With regards to IE specific code. Generally the approach I would take would: 1) Code normally and check compatibility of functions with the minimum version of IE. I then either polyfill the browser (if I understand the polyfill, some polyfills are quite large). Where I don't understand what the polyfill is doing or it is quite large (more than 40 or 50 lines) I then implement a specific work around and try to put it that logic in a separate function e.g. for dataset on Elements I have a function that detects whether data set exists and then just uses setAttribute with some regex munging as 90% of the time I only need to read and write dataset values and I rarely care about dom mutations. 2) Regarding styling. My approach is to that I style everything up and then use specific overrides for things that browsers can't do. I also tend to avoid specific IE builds as you end up supporting almost two code bases. However I have years of intuition of what will and won't work in outdated browsers. However I appreciate that this isn't always possible or desirable depending on frameworks / libs used etc.
bachmeier 7y ago
One comment on this being a good prediction of what we see in 2020. Yes, it was obvious in the 1990s that the web was going to be a platform for apps. That was why browsers were such a big piece of the antitrust case against Microsoft. The charge made against Microsoft was that it was better to write to a browser API than to the Windows API, and that's why Microsoft did what it could to kill browser competition with a Windows-only browser. That way, even if you wrote to the browser API, you were still writing your app for Windows. Java transformed the way people thought about these things. Microsoft didn't like Java and they didn't like competing browsers because they were reasonable platforms.
bluishscreen 7y ago
Super interesting to read about all the technologies (... MediaView? MOS? RPC for... webpage-like things?) & the way they imagined the future to look like before the web (... which is so obvious to us now that we can't even imagine anything else). E.g. the way they imagined webapps as getting a view of the file system, which is actually how Android apps turned out to be; not web apps though (... except maybe some very recent APIs?). Also, "payments" (for which we still don't have a standardized solution; we sell user data instead). Also, knowing CSS, their statement of "layout for the web is much easier than for Visual Basic" is kinda... endearing.
wintorez 7y ago
I'm happy about how web platform has progressed so far. You will be surprised how powerful it has became: https://whatwebcando.today/ https://whatwebcando.today/
- echelon 7y ago
  That's not the nature of the argument. We've strayed from thick clients to thin clients, where the user has no control over hardware or data. This is strictly worse from an ownership and control perspective than the early web.
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
So, what's the next platform?
- pictur 7y ago
  probably something that is not taken seriously
  - lioeters 7y ago
    Why Toys? - https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-toys/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-toys/ (2018) The next big thing will start out looking like a toy - https://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy https://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-... (2010)
- egypturnash 7y ago
  Fortnite.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tabtab 7y ago
As a lifetime CRUD programmer/architect, I have to say that the current web standards have been nasty to productivity-oriented CRUD. Desktop GUI's are still more productive and easier to develop. We de-evolved. The web really needs a GUI markup standard, something like YAML but with more interactive features. Emulating real GUI's via HTML/DOM/CSS/JS keeps failing in practice. They "break" too easy when new brands/versions of browsers come out. There's too many layers to get right and browser vendors don't always cooperate. A "GUI browser" that focuses on GUI's and only GUI's is needed so that distractions for other domains, such as social networks, don't get in the way. Java applets and Flash failed at their attempts because they tried to be too many things at the same time, making them too big to patch quickly when security problems were found. Do one job and do it well.

This is gold >> My nightmare scenario is that the Web grows into a rich application platform in an operating system-neutral way, and then a company like Siemens or Matsushita comes out with a $500 “WebMachine” that attaches to a TV. This WebMachine will let the customer do all the cool Internet stuff, plus manage home finances (all the storage is at the server side), and play games. When faced with the choice between a $500 box (RISC CPU, 4-8Mb RAM, no hard disk, …) and a $2KPentium/P6 Windows machine, the 2/3rds of homes that don’t have a PC may find the $500 machine pretty attractive!

jacobush 7y ago
Very prescient iPad / smart phone prediction there.
- pvg 7y ago
  It's a sensible prediction for a product developed and launched within a year of this memo being written and acquired by Microsoft within two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV
  - jacobush 7y ago
    I'm thinking on a higher level - what we have is exactly that the data is on servers and that people do not have control over their own hardware. And that the cheap hardware is good enough.
    - pvg 7y ago
      I'm not following how that's different from WebTV. The memo predicts a product like WebTV and that product materializes almost instantly. In the enterprise space, 'thin client' was already every second word out of Larry Ellison's mouth.
      - majormajor 7y ago
        > When faced with the choice between a $500 box (RISC CPU, 4-8Mb RAM, no hard disk, …) and a $2KPentium/P6 Windows machine, the 2/3rds of homes that don’t have a PC may find the $500 machine pretty attractive! WebTV wasn't the compelling product the author was concerned about. The open internet and more open hardware won then (to MS's benefit, for the author). But the modern phone is that more compelling alternative.
        pvg 7y ago
        There are a lot of things that turned out to be more compelling than WebTV but predicting WebTV doesn't make the author 'prescient' about them either. The claim was about the prescience not the compellingness.
        majormajor 7y ago
        The prescient bit to me was "the web could displace windows if it becomes full featured and there's a compelling alternative form factor to the PC." Tons of people predicted webTv-like systems, but predicting MS losing power was much less common.
        notahacker 7y ago
        tbf loads of people predicted MS would lose power in the nineties. They just thought it would be due to desktop Linux
        pvg 7y ago
        Ok but the comment I was responding it did not say that. As to the MS thing, I'm not sure that's all that accurate either. It's certainly striking that someone wrote this and presented it at a high level within Microsoft when they did. But it also isn't that far from the way the future of the web was framed outside of Microsoft. If anything, it's a reminder of the outsized role Microsoft used to play just in 'mindshare'. A great deal of discussion about the internet and the web revolved around how it might affect Microsoft, how it might be an opening for (or not) for Microsoft competitors and how Microsoft would respond. I don't think either Google or Apple today loom quite as large in people's perceptions.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      What the original author was worried about was a world where it was no longer the case that 99% of consumers had to pay OEM license fees to Microsoft to do these things. And by and large that came to pass - the web is a free platform.
- giantrobot 7y ago
  Web appliances are a far cry from tablets and smartphones. Those are both basically the exact opposite of a web appliance. They're network connected and can store data remotely but they have significant client side power. They also have significant local storage, at least compared to web appliances. The old web appliance concept was an extremely low powered device with no local storage. It had just enough power and storage to run a browser. The concept is more like a Chromebook/Chrometop than a tablet or smartphone. The web appliance concept was predicated on some early to mid 90s assumptions about technology trends: 1. Storage was expensive so just burn everything into a ROM. Saving data wouldn't be a thing as you'd bookmark sites or post data to websites. 2. The Pentium (and associated support chips) was expensive and would stay expensive. 3. The web would basically consist of static images and text. Input would be done with POSTs from form controls. 4. The web wouldn't adopt any vendor specific technologies and plug-ins won't exist. With these predicates some low powered RISC SoC running a browser would have been a decent appliance. WebTV and the Audrey weren't terrible products, they weren't great but also not terrible.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Yes, but still not seeing the forest for all the trees. Yes, a phone has substantial computing power - compared to old technology. But is has nothing in storage or processing power against the data centers of Netflix, Facebook and Google. It's very thin in relative terms. Indeed, even native apps go to almost comical lengths to not use the CPU on the phone. Granted, they use them but for inconsequential things like eye candy. Voice recognition and "your" social graph etc is on the remote server. It's almost like there is a law that nothing of importance must be computed on the local device.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      > Indeed, even native apps go to almost comical lengths to not use the CPU on the phone. This is needed in order to save battery life. But Netflix/FB/Google do not have "substantial" processing power per user. They're providing a centralized service to a very large userbase, and that comes with a requirement to economize on both compute and storage.
outside1234 7y ago
Also a good prediction for the crash in PC prices and the emergence of "webbooks"
mellow2020 7y ago
And this is a quote from Howard Rheingold: > You have to remember that in democratic societies citizens talking with each other is very important. We've lost a lot of that with the mass media. Now we have an opportunity for citizens to create their own communications with each other. So when these big deals with the big companies and the big governments carve up this new territory, I feel it's very important that we keep a kind of "social green belt", that we keep the ability for citizens to talk amongst each other. -- "The Computer Chronicles - The Internet (1993)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=22m14s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=22m14s
wmf 7y ago
A lot of thin clients came out in the 1990s and they were garbage. Web browsers are ridiculously inefficient (10x or more cycles to draw similar UI), yet thin clients had something like 1/10th the performance and 1/4th the RAM so the net performance would be 20x-100x worse than a PC for 1/4th the price. WebTV was kind of an exception to this; it was very fast due to the split browser architecture and putting very little content on the screen. IMO their amazing engineering was wasted on the low end of the market. VNC/Sun Ray was a much better idea, but only within a LAN.
- kyuudou 7y ago
  What became TippingPoint put out an Internet Appliance similarly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener
nomel 7y ago
Could this be what MS has in mind for the Xbox Series X?
- remir 7y ago
  Also the WebTV/MSN TV before it: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/MSN_TV https://www.wikiwand.com/en/MSN_TV

codenamepod 7y ago

This blog looks strange on a mobile.

ci5er 7y ago
Best comment evar!

johnchristopher 7y ago

It's incredible how it is visionary, articulated and spot-on and yet: > Once we have market and mind share on the Web with our products, we can take a leadership role in expanding and shaping the Web. They still want to strangle and submit the thing to their will and their will only.

enos_feedler 7y ago
So did this role end up in the hands of Google?
- moonchild 7y ago
  More or less. Microsoft tried, but they didn't spend enough time in the Embrace phase for it to work out. Google, meanwhile, has spent long enough in the Extend phase they they barely need to move on (though they are starting to now).
  - echelon 7y ago
    > Extend phase Chrome, AMP, "improved" HTML standards, platformization...

osrec 7y ago

>> If Microsoft is to influence the Web, we must have broad, standards-based Web support in our products — we have to be the product supplier of choice for all key existing Web technologies — clients, servers, and publishing tools, at a minimum. I honestly feel lack of this is what killed IE in the eyes of developers.

uk_programmer 7y ago
What killed IE (I am not a IE hater) is the amount of extra work you had to invest to get a site to work. I've recently done some work that had to work with versions of IE9-11. I consider myself pretty good with writing front end code that will work with IE and there are many gotchas that I had forgotten about. The debugger is painful to use even on IE11.
- osrec 7y ago
  I think that's the broad, standards based support that they were missing!
- computerex 7y ago
  The debugger in IE11 is so painful to use. It's an absolute nightmare. It takes forever to launch, it freezes, freezes the whole browser, I don't understand how it's acceptable for it to be so sluggish when running on a top of the line development workstation. The app I work on has to support IE11 and it's easily the worst part of the job. Often times regressions are made because someone accidentally used some js keyword/feature that's not supported. The build takes forever because of IE, and so there is a flag IE_BUILD that's false most of the times until someone has to test in IE at which point they turn it on and wait for 10 mins for the thing to build. We had to implement theming, and for every other browser we used CSS variables but for IE we had to implement a hacky/complicated solution where we compiled customer specific CSS files. In short, IE sucks and I wish it'd die.
  - uk_programmer 7y ago
    With regards to IE specific code. Generally the approach I would take would: 1) Code normally and check compatibility of functions with the minimum version of IE. I then either polyfill the browser (if I understand the polyfill, some polyfills are quite large). Where I don't understand what the polyfill is doing or it is quite large (more than 40 or 50 lines) I then implement a specific work around and try to put it that logic in a separate function e.g. for dataset on Elements I have a function that detects whether data set exists and then just uses setAttribute with some regex munging as 90% of the time I only need to read and write dataset values and I rarely care about dom mutations. 2) Regarding styling. My approach is to that I style everything up and then use specific overrides for things that browsers can't do. I also tend to avoid specific IE builds as you end up supporting almost two code bases. However I have years of intuition of what will and won't work in outdated browsers. However I appreciate that this isn't always possible or desirable depending on frameworks / libs used etc.

bachmeier 7y ago

One comment on this being a good prediction of what we see in 2020. Yes, it was obvious in the 1990s that the web was going to be a platform for apps. That was why browsers were such a big piece of the antitrust case against Microsoft. The charge made against Microsoft was that it was better to write to a browser API than to the Windows API, and that's why Microsoft did what it could to kill browser competition with a Windows-only browser. That way, even if you wrote to the browser API, you were still writing your app for Windows. Java transformed the way people thought about these things. Microsoft didn't like Java and they didn't like competing browsers because they were reasonable platforms.

bluishscreen 7y ago

Super interesting to read about all the technologies (... MediaView? MOS? RPC for... webpage-like things?) & the way they imagined the future to look like before the web (... which is so obvious to us now that we can't even imagine anything else). E.g. the way they imagined webapps as getting a view of the file system, which is actually how Android apps turned out to be; not web apps though (... except maybe some very recent APIs?). Also, "payments" (for which we still don't have a standardized solution; we sell user data instead). Also, knowing CSS, their statement of "layout for the web is much easier than for Visual Basic" is kinda... endearing.

wintorez 7y ago

I'm happy about how web platform has progressed so far. You will be surprised how powerful it has became: https://whatwebcando.today/ https://whatwebcando.today/

echelon 7y ago
That's not the nature of the argument. We've strayed from thick clients to thin clients, where the user has no control over hardware or data. This is strictly worse from an ownership and control perspective than the early web.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

So, what's the next platform?

pictur 7y ago
probably something that is not taken seriously
- lioeters 7y ago
  Why Toys? - https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-toys/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-toys/ (2018) The next big thing will start out looking like a toy - https://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy https://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-... (2010)
egypturnash 7y ago
Fortnite.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tabtab 7y ago

As a lifetime CRUD programmer/architect, I have to say that the current web standards have been nasty to productivity-oriented CRUD. Desktop GUI's are still more productive and easier to develop. We de-evolved. The web really needs a GUI markup standard, something like YAML but with more interactive features. Emulating real GUI's via HTML/DOM/CSS/JS keeps failing in practice. They "break" too easy when new brands/versions of browsers come out. There's too many layers to get right and browser vendors don't always cooperate. A "GUI browser" that focuses on GUI's and only GUI's is needed so that distractions for other domains, such as social networks, don't get in the way. Java applets and Flash failed at their attempts because they tried to be too many things at the same time, making them too big to patch quickly when security problems were found. Do one job and do it well.