8 ms·

The "All-Web" paradigm is coming, folks. And it really doesn't matter how much you love your iPhone, or your Android, or Windows phone. Native apps are toast,

The "All-Web" paradigm is coming, folks. And it really doesn't matter how much you love your iPhone, or your Android, or Windows phone. Native apps are toast, in the long run. Your data is moving to the cloud -- your pictures, your music, your movies, and every document you write. It's all going up there, and local hard drives will be history within 3 years. And what that means is ALL software is heading there too. Native apps running locally on your computer are going to be thing of the past, and it simply blows my mind that even people here on HackerNews completely fail to understand this fact. The computing landscape is changing right now, and any company that revolves around servicing Windows desktop software is going to be in for a real hard time. Whether or not Google's Chrome OS is the eventual successor is not clear (I don't think it is), but their general idea is correct. The all-network, all-cloud world is coming whether you like it or not.

whackberry 14y ago
Are you being sarcastic?
furyofantares 14y ago
Care to explain why you believe native apps are toast in the long run, or how that's related to data moving to the cloud? Web apps solved the problem of having to figure out how to find, install, or update software and not having it everywhere you go. App stores have caught up on discovery/installation/updates, and mobile has solved the problem of not having it everywhere I go. Web apps will eventually catch up on performance and maybe someday they will feel like first class citizens in any given OS rather than being relegated to mess of throwaway tabs. We've been within 3 years of that for something like a decade, but maybe we really finally are within 3 years of that. But we aren't within 3 years of having any two web apps looking similar and using familiar UI elements. Every web app is a new UI to learn, maybe not a problem for you or me, but mobile has reached 3 year olds and 90 year olds and everyone in between, most of whom have not acquired the skill to pick up umfamiliar UIs and don't want to. As for data moving to the cloud, I'm with you. And I have a lot of native apps that interact with remote data.
- wavephorm 14y ago
  Mobile apps, especially iOS apps, are hobbled by their curators. iPhone's don't even have an open file system and the platform was purposely designed so that apps are isolated, and funneled through a strict paradigm. This most certainly is not what I, or a lot of people want in a computing device -- it will not work, simply because a majority of innovators do not want to be locked into that universe. Apple has designed their platform to be a dead end. It is almost comical that that Google, Microsoft, and RIM have been trying follow Apple toward this dead end. On the development side of things I believe we're going to see a massive shift back to web-app development simply because of economics. There is no way any small group of developers can build desktop, iOS, and Android versions of their application simultaneously. This iOS fad WILL DIE because of costs, and that fact that Android numbers are rising dramatically, and people need to come up with a way to support each mobile platform and be able to use that app from their desktops too -- mobile web apps are the answer.
  - ryanhuff 14y ago
    Your reasons, while important and meaningful from a developers perspective, mean little to the consumer choosing between a native app and a mobile web app. What's in it for the consumer?
    - icebraining 14y ago
      Why would a consumer even know or care about that? They'll use whatever is easy to find, "install" (even if it means just a button that links to an URL), use and looks nice. They don't give a fuck if it's written JS or Java/ObjC or if it's HTML or XML or code rendering the UI.
  - cageface 14y ago
    This most certainly is not what I, or a lot of people want in a computing device Most people don't even understand what a filesystem is, nevermind whether it's open or not. I agree with you that data is moving online but that's orthogonal to the native vs web app question.
Karunamon 14y ago
taps his sarcasm detector looking confused, frowns, throws it over his shoulder and glares
moistgorilla 14y ago
Great, another prophet. Worst thing is, if you somehow are correct, you would not stop shoving it in people's faces how right you are. Cloud is not the future, not with the current US internet infrastructure at least. Also why would someone pay 10 dollars a month for 50 GB of space in the cloud when you can buy 1 TB portable hard drives for dirt cheap?
- wickedchicken 14y ago
  > Also why would someone pay 10 dollars a month for 50 GB of space in the cloud when you can buy 1 TB portable hard drives for dirt cheap? housefires.
  - unimpressive 14y ago
    If anything I'd be more worried about thieves stealing my data. (In the literal, 'break into my house and take it.' sort of way.) I know it's happened to at least one indie developer. And at least one youtube blogger that comes to mind. That having been said, local hard drives aren't going to die anytime soon. Uncle McCarthy has not yet had his day, at least not on that one.
    - cantankerous 14y ago
      You know, encryption and a decently strong password pretty much seals the deal on somebody physically stealing your data. There is no reason to not encrypt your home computer if you are so concerned.
      - unimpressive 14y ago
        >You know, encryption and a decently strong password pretty much seals the deal on somebody physically stealing your data. Maybe stealing it and using the data. If someone swipes my drive the data is still gone. Even if it is inaccessible.
        14y ago
rsl7 14y ago
OOO, so in your future I get to choose between having ads on all my apps or renting my own data.
lukeschlather 14y ago
I think there's going to be a big watershed moment. One of the big cloud service providers is going to have a major data loss event. (Probably Google or Facebook, but who knows, Microsoft or Amazon or a number of others are equally vulnerable.) At that point, it will be interesting to see how far into the rabbit hole we've gone and how we react to seeing so much of our info vanish. I'll be hanging on to my local hard drive tooth and nail. (Backing up to S3 or something mind you, but make no mistake my local disk is the master copy.)
- ajross 14y ago
  Google's been indexing the web and Amazon executing bazillions of legally binding sales without a "major data loss event" for 13 years now. I don't think that's really likely. At that scale, backups aren't really a .serious problem, as you have to have redundancy in the system for reliability reasons anyway. A "major privacy event" seems quite likely though.
  - JadeNB 14y ago
    > Google's been indexing the web and Amazon executing bazillions of legally binding sales without a "major data loss event" for 13 years now. I don't think that's really likely. At that scale, backups aren't really a .serious problem, as you have to have redundancy in the system for reliability reasons anyway. How do you know that there hasn't been a major data loss event for Google? Would you be able to tell the difference if, say, a quarter of their data were gone? (I agree that it would be more visible if Amazon had a major data loss, but the fact that you don't know about it doesn't mean it didn't. In fact, can you name a major data loss of which you do know? (I can't, but that may just be because I don't follow these things.) Surely one can't conclude from the fact that there are few well publicised examples that businesses do not suffer such losses.)
    - pjin 14y ago
      It's happened before, at least once very early on: Google had taken ill. The problem was the index storing the contents of the web in Google's servers. For a couple of months in early 2000, it wasn't updating at all. Millions of documents created during that period weren't being being collected. As far as the Google search engine was concerned, they didn't exist. http://books.google.com/books?id=V1u1f8sv3k8C&pg=PA41&dq=in+the+plex+updating+at+all&hl=en&sa=X&ei=FYSfT_qtLMn16AHnsei2Ag&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=V1u1f8sv3k8C&pg=PA41&#3...
jamesaguilar 14y ago
People have been saying this for decades. It may turn out to be true but there aren't a competitive versions of a lot of the programs I use on the web yet. And "whether you like it or not" is a silly thing to say in light of the fact that user preferences are exactly what will determine whether your utopia will be the one that actually comes.
kristopolous 14y ago
Even if you were 100% correct, hard drives aren't going anywhere. Browser cache is around 1GB and web developers are itching for vast landscapes of local storage systems. And where do you expect the operating system and marvelous web stack where all these things are created to reside? Burned in EEPROM? I think the consumer already can't really differentiate between what is local or over the internet, they don't know what a browser is by and large. But if what you say is right, the pendulum, at the consumer level, will soon swing back the other way the first time that someone can't access the "cloud" on a trip or forgets to pay their "cloud access bill" (phone/internet whatever) and then gets locked out of ... well, everything. Castrating the device and agitating the users by making everything Microsoft Palladium style will continue to be a bad idea. Remember Sun's motto, "The network is the computer"? Nah, don't think so; the computer is the computer. Networks are pretty important, but they do not replace everything, they are fundamentally not reliable, responsive, or resilient enough to. And every time a step is made in any of those directions, it's done because some machine or some network, somewhere else, is better off. That rising tide will lift all boats, keeping the consumer devices edging ahead; that is unless, you are harking back to the "give consumers bare minimum craptaculous cloud terminals". That's been tried about every 3 months for the past 35 years or so and has never gone well.
- wavephorm 14y ago
  Browser cache is around 1GB and web developers are itching for vast landscapes of local storage systems. We're moving toward a computing world where hard drives don't even exist. Within 3 years we may see devices that have only persistent RAM. And for large files, I bet we'll see some nice competition between Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, and others which may eventually lead to making hard drives obsolete. Nah, don't think so; the computer is the computer. Network... is not reliable, responsive, or resilient enough to. Not yet, but I think we are steamrolling toward this conclusion. Apple might have successfully convinced everyone into thinking that downloading software and installing it is some fancy new thing, but really just it's old-fashioned nonsense that is only necessary for their arcane software platform to work.
  - vacri 14y ago
goodgracious 14y ago
Nonsense. True, companies will encourage voluntarily uploading your stuff to their computers. Why shouldn't they? Just like they solicit your email address, track your movements, snarf your smartphone address book and other neat tricks. There's value in getting that info. That doesn't mean everyone is going to fall for it. Some will, no doubt. But GB's are getting cheaper every day. And not just for "cloud providers". How many terbaytes does one person need? You can fit your whole life's worth of data onto today's capacities of consumer digital storage. Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media? What drugs are you on? The web is brittle. It's but one of many things that can be run over IP. You web-fanatics crack me up.
- wavephorm 14y ago
  Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media? Yes that's coming. Many countries are starting to put tariffs on hard drives. And in my country, Canada, they also slow down your internet when downloading large files and it costs $1.5 per gigabyte to exceed my 85GB/mo limit. I might as well redirect my downloads to an online service and keep all my data online until I need. My bet is within 3 years we'll reach the threshold where it might as well be worth it to store files online rather download them and store them permanently on hard drives on a computer running constantly in your home.
  - gloob 14y ago
    I feel like I'm missing something terribly obvious, but... How does "it is getting harder and slower to move large files over the net" lead to the conclusion "therefore we should store all our large files on the net and retrieve them whenever we want, rather than keep them on local media with negligible latency and huge storage space"?
  - goodgracious 14y ago
    Solution: VPS outside Canada to do your downloads from. But what you describe is a networking problem (transit costs of your ISP passed on to you). Not a storage problem. A "cloud storage" provider is just going to keep the data you store in a datacenter near to you anyway, not halfway around the world. But it's not like keeping your physical stuff with a storage company. You can easily store the data yourself with many more advantages. The marketing teams for "cloud storage" services will no doubt try to convince people otherwise.
snarfy 14y ago
I'm waiting for it to come full circle - the day when the browser VM is so advanced it's basically a VMWare shim and each web page is really an OS that boots up, then we can finally throw away all the development crap collectively known as web duct tape and use real tools for software development.
- jodrellblank 14y ago
  Presumably you've seen http://bellard.org/jslinux/ http://bellard.org/jslinux/ ? If someone (Google, Mozilla) pushed for it, this could be merged with a browser API / VirtualBox for speed and completeness, and you could download a paused machine with state. It's not happening now, but it's possible already.
- mechazoidal 14y ago
  As jodrellblank says, it's been possible to do this for a long time: Inferno IE4 plugin: http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/plugin/index.html http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/plugin/index.html Lively Kernel: http://www.lively-kernel.org/ http://www.lively-kernel.org/
ekianjo 14y ago
Yeah, and in 2 years desktop computers will be gone, people will only use tablets, and Linux will have completely disappeared as a desktop environment (together with the fore-mentioned gone desktop computers, probably?). I always like people who over-simplify things to the extreme. They don't seem to understand that different solutions exist because there are different needs. Ever thought about doing video editing of a More-than-HD-video on a network connection ? Ever thought of RAW images storage, taking up 30 seconds to load one image through your ISP? Ever thought of people living away from large cities, with slow internet connection ? Obviously not. You must be living in a microcosm where everyone has 1Tb/s Net access under their tables.
- roel_v 14y ago
  "and Linux will have completely disappeared as a desktop environment" Of course not! 2014 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, just like every other year for the last 15 years!
  - ekianjo 14y ago
    Hehe. Joking aside, I do not see the Linux desktop losing "share" in the near future. It may be a very long time before it reaches significant market size, but the latest major distributions are very solid (OpenSuse 12.1, Ubuntu 12.04, Mint), drivers support is better than ever (while not perfect), and "app stores" are becoming more and more common. There are signs of progress, and if the rumours of a Linux client for Steam are real, there is no way it cannot grow further.
  - Produce 14y ago
    The year of Linux on the desktop already happened a few years ago. I recently fixed a friend's PC by installing Ubuntu on it. Everything worked out of the box - sound, flash, games. All I had to do was adjust the audio input levels. The only reason everyone else isn't using it is politics (in particular, shoddy marketing by companies like Ubuntu, Microsoft's constant attacks on organisations which use OSS, Microsoft's deals with OEM's).
    - 14y ago
tlrobinson 14y ago
I mostly agree, but web apps have been set back a few years by mobile. I had this conversation with my girlfriend the other day: Her: If ____ had a [mobile] app I'd waste so much time on it. Me: You know you can use their website on your phone, right? Her: Yeah, but apps are so much better. Out of curiosity, I went to this particular site on my phone and they actually do have a mobile web app, complete with home screen icon and the meta tags to make it fullscreen. If you add it your homescreen it could pass as a decent native app. There are two problems with web apps right now: 1) Quality. It's pretty hard to make really nice mobile web apps, or apps in general. There are lots of behaviors in the browser that are un-app-like which you need to work around. Native platforms were designed for apps from the start. Performance can also be an issue (possibly solved by something like NativeClient). 2) Discoverability. Users look for app in the app store first. If they don't find it they often don't check for a mobile web app, either because they're not aware they exist or they assume it will be crap. App stores need to have better integration for web apps. In the meantime, wrappers like PhoneGap can help.
stevewilhelm 14y ago
"All-Web" makes hardware a commodity. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. have a huge incentive (literally billions of dollars of incentive) to keep the user experience on their devices better than that of any other device. Native apps may be toast, but they won't go without a fight.
peterwwillis 14y ago
It's really goddamn depressing to hear this, whether or not it's a joke. Both because it's asinine (most of my computing is done offline except for small bursts of internet activity, because the alternative would be completely unusable) and the idea is totally nonsensical. Next you're gonna tell me they're gonna introduce a language which when compiled into a single compressed file in some kind of 'virtual mechanism' will run on any platform and everyone will use it because the technology is so much better than anything else.
ghshephard 14y ago
Great concept - your timeline is way off. Wireless network connectivity is unlikely to be where it needs to be for at least another 20 years for people who work with larger documents. Hell, I have a tough enough time in our corporate offices in São Paulo, Brazil accessing 100 MB Slide Decks in our Redwood City offices over _wired_ connections - I don't want to think how long before places like Belém get half decent _wireless connectivity_. Until then - I'll still need my Windows/Macintosh Laptop with local Apps/data. Thick apps aren't going anywhere in the near future. Video Editing, Adobe Photoshop - they'll all be huge-honking local apps for at least another 10-15 years.
- fragsworth 14y ago
  "Cloud devices" can still use local hardware acceleration, storage, and memory for client-side things. Nothing is really preventing us from developing cloud-based video and photo editing software. Some work might have to be done to minimize the amount of data that gets transferred when saving and loading, but that's about it. I'm sure if you compress your 100MB Slide Decks file you'll find it much easier to send over!
  - slowpoke 14y ago
    Why jump through hoops to make a suboptimal solution half-viable, if we got a solution that just works and works well: native apps. Seriously, all that cloud stuff is overrated nonsense. There's some areas where it might sense, but stop trying to put every fucking thing on the cloud. It just doesn't work. End of story.
mark_integerdsv 14y ago
Written like someone who has never experienced 3rd world Internet.
- octotoad 14y ago
  Exactly. It's easy to tout this 'cloud' based world as a looming, common-place utopia when you're an uber nerd who is completely detached from everyday 'normal' people who barely understand the basic concepts of the internet/web, or who have severely lacking bandwidth and data usage quotas.
- com 14y ago
  Or who has never experienced the bill-shock nightmare that is international data roaming. Always on is nice if you live in a city with good coverage and you can afford the bill.
pjmlp 14y ago
I surely hope not. The web is for documents.
vectorpush 14y ago
I hate to break it to you, but a web browser is just an arbitrary native app running data over TCP/IP. Native apps aren't going anywhere.
grego 14y ago
Bollocks I say. It's all about latency and bandwidth. If I'd have fiber in my cabin in Montana, I might agree. Perfect connectivity all times is just a dream. Plus native will always have an edge. Sure my calendar is in the cloud, but everything.. nah, don't think so. For photos and videos the pipes ain't fat enough for anything but backup and sync.
RyanMcGreal 14y ago
I think it's a bit binary to suggest that everything's going to the cloud and nothing will be local any more. I rather expect we're heading toward the more robust, resilient approach of local storage with seamless cloud synchronization, dropbox-style.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Angostura 14y ago
>but their general idea is correct. The all-network, all-cloud world is coming whether you like it or not. Clearly you have the religious fervor upon you. Personally I like it when I see the benefits. Currently that's for a subset of my computing tasks. Sharing stuff? Sure. Off-site backup, OK. Most other stuff? I'm happy sticking to the PC model rather than the thin client-mainframe timeshare model.
mgkimsal 14y ago
"Native apps are toast, in the long run." Until mobile browsers have access to the full range of hardware on a device (camera, microphone), native apps will have an edge. Example: camera/pictures - ios doesn't allow camera/cameraroll access from the browser, android does, and wp7 used to but removed it. If you want to offer people a way to send you pictures from your app, it's gotta be native for now.
Tloewald 14y ago
I can have all my data and my apps in the cloud and still run native software. In fact, this is the iOS approach. On the whole, the ability to transparently cache big chunks of data locally turns out to offer a superior user experience in many non insignificant use cases (e.g. Downloading content for later consumption while off grid). I don't think it's clear that the web approach will win out, and I certainly think it will not be settled in three years. And photo and video libraries (which are popular and growing faster than bandwidth or storage) aren't going to the cloud any time soon.
rpeden 14y ago
I remember similar things being said in the 90s. We'd all be be ditching Windows and running internet appliances and doing everything via the web and Java applets. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that similar predictions haven't panned out in the past.
crag 14y ago
Not in most of America. Maybe the Valley or NYC. But in places like Florida, where Comcast (the biggest carrier) drops when thunderstorm roll by good luck. And business... pushing all your data to the cloud is a mistake. For many reasons such as; security. Look there is no way I'm putting sensitive data, like accounting, patient information, (etc) in the cloud. It's just not worth the risk or the lawsuit. Also, I know a guy who owns a gym. Was talked into a "hosted cash register". BIG MISTAKE. After the install, a week later early morning storm rolls in from the ocean. His power flips (a common thing in South Florida). But his Comcast never came back online. He was down (and out of business) for 4 hours. Personally though, I enjoyed hearing his plight. He's a cheap sob. Some of you might say, that is what he deserves for relying on Comcast. Fine. But what small business you know it gonna go through the expense of a T1/3 or fiber? That $29.99 a month cash register just became $300+ a month. Lovely. My point: out in the real world (in America) the infrastructure is barely stable. Until the carries seriouslly invest (and I doubt they ever will since they only provide exactly what they have too - I don't even want to get started on our TERRIBLE cell service in this country) in their networks, the "cloud" will be a site you share pictures of your dog.
bluedanieru 14y ago
>local hard drives will be history within 3 years Want to make a bet? Name your stakes.

whackberry 14y ago

Are you being sarcastic?

furyofantares 14y ago

Care to explain why you believe native apps are toast in the long run, or how that's related to data moving to the cloud? Web apps solved the problem of having to figure out how to find, install, or update software and not having it everywhere you go. App stores have caught up on discovery/installation/updates, and mobile has solved the problem of not having it everywhere I go. Web apps will eventually catch up on performance and maybe someday they will feel like first class citizens in any given OS rather than being relegated to mess of throwaway tabs. We've been within 3 years of that for something like a decade, but maybe we really finally are within 3 years of that. But we aren't within 3 years of having any two web apps looking similar and using familiar UI elements. Every web app is a new UI to learn, maybe not a problem for you or me, but mobile has reached 3 year olds and 90 year olds and everyone in between, most of whom have not acquired the skill to pick up umfamiliar UIs and don't want to. As for data moving to the cloud, I'm with you. And I have a lot of native apps that interact with remote data.

wavephorm 14y ago
Mobile apps, especially iOS apps, are hobbled by their curators. iPhone's don't even have an open file system and the platform was purposely designed so that apps are isolated, and funneled through a strict paradigm. This most certainly is not what I, or a lot of people want in a computing device -- it will not work, simply because a majority of innovators do not want to be locked into that universe. Apple has designed their platform to be a dead end. It is almost comical that that Google, Microsoft, and RIM have been trying follow Apple toward this dead end. On the development side of things I believe we're going to see a massive shift back to web-app development simply because of economics. There is no way any small group of developers can build desktop, iOS, and Android versions of their application simultaneously. This iOS fad WILL DIE because of costs, and that fact that Android numbers are rising dramatically, and people need to come up with a way to support each mobile platform and be able to use that app from their desktops too -- mobile web apps are the answer.
- ryanhuff 14y ago
  Your reasons, while important and meaningful from a developers perspective, mean little to the consumer choosing between a native app and a mobile web app. What's in it for the consumer?
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Why would a consumer even know or care about that? They'll use whatever is easy to find, "install" (even if it means just a button that links to an URL), use and looks nice. They don't give a fuck if it's written JS or Java/ObjC or if it's HTML or XML or code rendering the UI.
- cageface 14y ago
  This most certainly is not what I, or a lot of people want in a computing device Most people don't even understand what a filesystem is, nevermind whether it's open or not. I agree with you that data is moving online but that's orthogonal to the native vs web app question.

Karunamon 14y ago

taps his sarcasm detector looking confused, frowns, throws it over his shoulder and glares

moistgorilla 14y ago

Great, another prophet. Worst thing is, if you somehow are correct, you would not stop shoving it in people's faces how right you are. Cloud is not the future, not with the current US internet infrastructure at least. Also why would someone pay 10 dollars a month for 50 GB of space in the cloud when you can buy 1 TB portable hard drives for dirt cheap?

wickedchicken 14y ago
> Also why would someone pay 10 dollars a month for 50 GB of space in the cloud when you can buy 1 TB portable hard drives for dirt cheap? housefires.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  If anything I'd be more worried about thieves stealing my data. (In the literal, 'break into my house and take it.' sort of way.) I know it's happened to at least one indie developer. And at least one youtube blogger that comes to mind. That having been said, local hard drives aren't going to die anytime soon. Uncle McCarthy has not yet had his day, at least not on that one.
  - cantankerous 14y ago
    You know, encryption and a decently strong password pretty much seals the deal on somebody physically stealing your data. There is no reason to not encrypt your home computer if you are so concerned.
    - unimpressive 14y ago
      >You know, encryption and a decently strong password pretty much seals the deal on somebody physically stealing your data. Maybe stealing it and using the data. If someone swipes my drive the data is still gone. Even if it is inaccessible.
      - 14y ago

rsl7 14y ago

OOO, so in your future I get to choose between having ads on all my apps or renting my own data.

lukeschlather 14y ago

I think there's going to be a big watershed moment. One of the big cloud service providers is going to have a major data loss event. (Probably Google or Facebook, but who knows, Microsoft or Amazon or a number of others are equally vulnerable.) At that point, it will be interesting to see how far into the rabbit hole we've gone and how we react to seeing so much of our info vanish. I'll be hanging on to my local hard drive tooth and nail. (Backing up to S3 or something mind you, but make no mistake my local disk is the master copy.)

ajross 14y ago
Google's been indexing the web and Amazon executing bazillions of legally binding sales without a "major data loss event" for 13 years now. I don't think that's really likely. At that scale, backups aren't really a .serious problem, as you have to have redundancy in the system for reliability reasons anyway. A "major privacy event" seems quite likely though.
- JadeNB 14y ago
  > Google's been indexing the web and Amazon executing bazillions of legally binding sales without a "major data loss event" for 13 years now. I don't think that's really likely. At that scale, backups aren't really a .serious problem, as you have to have redundancy in the system for reliability reasons anyway. How do you know that there hasn't been a major data loss event for Google? Would you be able to tell the difference if, say, a quarter of their data were gone? (I agree that it would be more visible if Amazon had a major data loss, but the fact that you don't know about it doesn't mean it didn't. In fact, can you name a major data loss of which you do know? (I can't, but that may just be because I don't follow these things.) Surely one can't conclude from the fact that there are few well publicised examples that businesses do not suffer such losses.)
  - pjin 14y ago
    It's happened before, at least once very early on: Google had taken ill. The problem was the index storing the contents of the web in Google's servers. For a couple of months in early 2000, it wasn't updating at all. Millions of documents created during that period weren't being being collected. As far as the Google search engine was concerned, they didn't exist. http://books.google.com/books?id=V1u1f8sv3k8C&pg=PA41&dq=in+the+plex+updating+at+all&hl=en&sa=X&ei=FYSfT_qtLMn16AHnsei2Ag&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=V1u1f8sv3k8C&pg=PA41&#3...

jamesaguilar 14y ago

People have been saying this for decades. It may turn out to be true but there aren't a competitive versions of a lot of the programs I use on the web yet. And "whether you like it or not" is a silly thing to say in light of the fact that user preferences are exactly what will determine whether your utopia will be the one that actually comes.

kristopolous 14y ago

Even if you were 100% correct, hard drives aren't going anywhere. Browser cache is around 1GB and web developers are itching for vast landscapes of local storage systems. And where do you expect the operating system and marvelous web stack where all these things are created to reside? Burned in EEPROM? I think the consumer already can't really differentiate between what is local or over the internet, they don't know what a browser is by and large. But if what you say is right, the pendulum, at the consumer level, will soon swing back the other way the first time that someone can't access the "cloud" on a trip or forgets to pay their "cloud access bill" (phone/internet whatever) and then gets locked out of ... well, everything. Castrating the device and agitating the users by making everything Microsoft Palladium style will continue to be a bad idea. Remember Sun's motto, "The network is the computer"? Nah, don't think so; the computer is the computer. Networks are pretty important, but they do not replace everything, they are fundamentally not reliable, responsive, or resilient enough to. And every time a step is made in any of those directions, it's done because some machine or some network, somewhere else, is better off. That rising tide will lift all boats, keeping the consumer devices edging ahead; that is unless, you are harking back to the "give consumers bare minimum craptaculous cloud terminals". That's been tried about every 3 months for the past 35 years or so and has never gone well.

wavephorm 14y ago
Browser cache is around 1GB and web developers are itching for vast landscapes of local storage systems. We're moving toward a computing world where hard drives don't even exist. Within 3 years we may see devices that have only persistent RAM. And for large files, I bet we'll see some nice competition between Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, and others which may eventually lead to making hard drives obsolete. Nah, don't think so; the computer is the computer. Network... is not reliable, responsive, or resilient enough to. Not yet, but I think we are steamrolling toward this conclusion. Apple might have successfully convinced everyone into thinking that downloading software and installing it is some fancy new thing, but really just it's old-fashioned nonsense that is only necessary for their arcane software platform to work.
- vacri 14y ago

goodgracious 14y ago

Nonsense. True, companies will encourage voluntarily uploading your stuff to their computers. Why shouldn't they? Just like they solicit your email address, track your movements, snarf your smartphone address book and other neat tricks. There's value in getting that info. That doesn't mean everyone is going to fall for it. Some will, no doubt. But GB's are getting cheaper every day. And not just for "cloud providers". How many terbaytes does one person need? You can fit your whole life's worth of data onto today's capacities of consumer digital storage. Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media? What drugs are you on? The web is brittle. It's but one of many things that can be run over IP. You web-fanatics crack me up.

wavephorm 14y ago
Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media? Yes that's coming. Many countries are starting to put tariffs on hard drives. And in my country, Canada, they also slow down your internet when downloading large files and it costs $1.5 per gigabyte to exceed my 85GB/mo limit. I might as well redirect my downloads to an online service and keep all my data online until I need. My bet is within 3 years we'll reach the threshold where it might as well be worth it to store files online rather download them and store them permanently on hard drives on a computer running constantly in your home.
- gloob 14y ago
  I feel like I'm missing something terribly obvious, but... How does "it is getting harder and slower to move large files over the net" lead to the conclusion "therefore we should store all our large files on the net and retrieve them whenever we want, rather than keep them on local media with negligible latency and huge storage space"?
- goodgracious 14y ago
  Solution: VPS outside Canada to do your downloads from. But what you describe is a networking problem (transit costs of your ISP passed on to you). Not a storage problem. A "cloud storage" provider is just going to keep the data you store in a datacenter near to you anyway, not halfway around the world. But it's not like keeping your physical stuff with a storage company. You can easily store the data yourself with many more advantages. The marketing teams for "cloud storage" services will no doubt try to convince people otherwise.

snarfy 14y ago

I'm waiting for it to come full circle - the day when the browser VM is so advanced it's basically a VMWare shim and each web page is really an OS that boots up, then we can finally throw away all the development crap collectively known as web duct tape and use real tools for software development.

jodrellblank 14y ago
Presumably you've seen http://bellard.org/jslinux/ http://bellard.org/jslinux/ ? If someone (Google, Mozilla) pushed for it, this could be merged with a browser API / VirtualBox for speed and completeness, and you could download a paused machine with state. It's not happening now, but it's possible already.
mechazoidal 14y ago
As jodrellblank says, it's been possible to do this for a long time: Inferno IE4 plugin: http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/plugin/index.html http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/plugin/index.html Lively Kernel: http://www.lively-kernel.org/ http://www.lively-kernel.org/

ekianjo 14y ago

Yeah, and in 2 years desktop computers will be gone, people will only use tablets, and Linux will have completely disappeared as a desktop environment (together with the fore-mentioned gone desktop computers, probably?). I always like people who over-simplify things to the extreme. They don't seem to understand that different solutions exist because there are different needs. Ever thought about doing video editing of a More-than-HD-video on a network connection ? Ever thought of RAW images storage, taking up 30 seconds to load one image through your ISP? Ever thought of people living away from large cities, with slow internet connection ? Obviously not. You must be living in a microcosm where everyone has 1Tb/s Net access under their tables.

roel_v 14y ago
"and Linux will have completely disappeared as a desktop environment" Of course not! 2014 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, just like every other year for the last 15 years!
- ekianjo 14y ago
  Hehe. Joking aside, I do not see the Linux desktop losing "share" in the near future. It may be a very long time before it reaches significant market size, but the latest major distributions are very solid (OpenSuse 12.1, Ubuntu 12.04, Mint), drivers support is better than ever (while not perfect), and "app stores" are becoming more and more common. There are signs of progress, and if the rumours of a Linux client for Steam are real, there is no way it cannot grow further.
- Produce 14y ago
  The year of Linux on the desktop already happened a few years ago. I recently fixed a friend's PC by installing Ubuntu on it. Everything worked out of the box - sound, flash, games. All I had to do was adjust the audio input levels. The only reason everyone else isn't using it is politics (in particular, shoddy marketing by companies like Ubuntu, Microsoft's constant attacks on organisations which use OSS, Microsoft's deals with OEM's).
  - 14y ago

tlrobinson 14y ago

I mostly agree, but web apps have been set back a few years by mobile. I had this conversation with my girlfriend the other day: Her: If ____ had a [mobile] app I'd waste so much time on it. Me: You know you can use their website on your phone, right? Her: Yeah, but apps are so much better. Out of curiosity, I went to this particular site on my phone and they actually do have a mobile web app, complete with home screen icon and the meta tags to make it fullscreen. If you add it your homescreen it could pass as a decent native app. There are two problems with web apps right now: 1) Quality. It's pretty hard to make really nice mobile web apps, or apps in general. There are lots of behaviors in the browser that are un-app-like which you need to work around. Native platforms were designed for apps from the start. Performance can also be an issue (possibly solved by something like NativeClient). 2) Discoverability. Users look for app in the app store first. If they don't find it they often don't check for a mobile web app, either because they're not aware they exist or they assume it will be crap. App stores need to have better integration for web apps. In the meantime, wrappers like PhoneGap can help.

stevewilhelm 14y ago

"All-Web" makes hardware a commodity. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. have a huge incentive (literally billions of dollars of incentive) to keep the user experience on their devices better than that of any other device. Native apps may be toast, but they won't go without a fight.

peterwwillis 14y ago

It's really goddamn depressing to hear this, whether or not it's a joke. Both because it's asinine (most of my computing is done offline except for small bursts of internet activity, because the alternative would be completely unusable) and the idea is totally nonsensical. Next you're gonna tell me they're gonna introduce a language which when compiled into a single compressed file in some kind of 'virtual mechanism' will run on any platform and everyone will use it because the technology is so much better than anything else.

ghshephard 14y ago

Great concept - your timeline is way off. Wireless network connectivity is unlikely to be where it needs to be for at least another 20 years for people who work with larger documents. Hell, I have a tough enough time in our corporate offices in São Paulo, Brazil accessing 100 MB Slide Decks in our Redwood City offices over _wired_ connections - I don't want to think how long before places like Belém get half decent _wireless connectivity_. Until then - I'll still need my Windows/Macintosh Laptop with local Apps/data. Thick apps aren't going anywhere in the near future. Video Editing, Adobe Photoshop - they'll all be huge-honking local apps for at least another 10-15 years.

fragsworth 14y ago
"Cloud devices" can still use local hardware acceleration, storage, and memory for client-side things. Nothing is really preventing us from developing cloud-based video and photo editing software. Some work might have to be done to minimize the amount of data that gets transferred when saving and loading, but that's about it. I'm sure if you compress your 100MB Slide Decks file you'll find it much easier to send over!
- slowpoke 14y ago
  Why jump through hoops to make a suboptimal solution half-viable, if we got a solution that just works and works well: native apps. Seriously, all that cloud stuff is overrated nonsense. There's some areas where it might sense, but stop trying to put every fucking thing on the cloud. It just doesn't work. End of story.

mark_integerdsv 14y ago

Written like someone who has never experienced 3rd world Internet.

octotoad 14y ago
Exactly. It's easy to tout this 'cloud' based world as a looming, common-place utopia when you're an uber nerd who is completely detached from everyday 'normal' people who barely understand the basic concepts of the internet/web, or who have severely lacking bandwidth and data usage quotas.
com 14y ago
Or who has never experienced the bill-shock nightmare that is international data roaming. Always on is nice if you live in a city with good coverage and you can afford the bill.

pjmlp 14y ago

I surely hope not. The web is for documents.

vectorpush 14y ago

I hate to break it to you, but a web browser is just an arbitrary native app running data over TCP/IP. Native apps aren't going anywhere.

grego 14y ago

Bollocks I say. It's all about latency and bandwidth. If I'd have fiber in my cabin in Montana, I might agree. Perfect connectivity all times is just a dream. Plus native will always have an edge. Sure my calendar is in the cloud, but everything.. nah, don't think so. For photos and videos the pipes ain't fat enough for anything but backup and sync.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago

I think it's a bit binary to suggest that everything's going to the cloud and nothing will be local any more. I rather expect we're heading toward the more robust, resilient approach of local storage with seamless cloud synchronization, dropbox-style.

deleted 14y ago

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Angostura 14y ago

>but their general idea is correct. The all-network, all-cloud world is coming whether you like it or not. Clearly you have the religious fervor upon you. Personally I like it when I see the benefits. Currently that's for a subset of my computing tasks. Sharing stuff? Sure. Off-site backup, OK. Most other stuff? I'm happy sticking to the PC model rather than the thin client-mainframe timeshare model.

mgkimsal 14y ago

"Native apps are toast, in the long run." Until mobile browsers have access to the full range of hardware on a device (camera, microphone), native apps will have an edge. Example: camera/pictures - ios doesn't allow camera/cameraroll access from the browser, android does, and wp7 used to but removed it. If you want to offer people a way to send you pictures from your app, it's gotta be native for now.

Tloewald 14y ago

I can have all my data and my apps in the cloud and still run native software. In fact, this is the iOS approach. On the whole, the ability to transparently cache big chunks of data locally turns out to offer a superior user experience in many non insignificant use cases (e.g. Downloading content for later consumption while off grid). I don't think it's clear that the web approach will win out, and I certainly think it will not be settled in three years. And photo and video libraries (which are popular and growing faster than bandwidth or storage) aren't going to the cloud any time soon.

rpeden 14y ago

I remember similar things being said in the 90s. We'd all be be ditching Windows and running internet appliances and doing everything via the web and Java applets. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that similar predictions haven't panned out in the past.

crag 14y ago

Not in most of America. Maybe the Valley or NYC. But in places like Florida, where Comcast (the biggest carrier) drops when thunderstorm roll by good luck. And business... pushing all your data to the cloud is a mistake. For many reasons such as; security. Look there is no way I'm putting sensitive data, like accounting, patient information, (etc) in the cloud. It's just not worth the risk or the lawsuit. Also, I know a guy who owns a gym. Was talked into a "hosted cash register". BIG MISTAKE. After the install, a week later early morning storm rolls in from the ocean. His power flips (a common thing in South Florida). But his Comcast never came back online. He was down (and out of business) for 4 hours. Personally though, I enjoyed hearing his plight. He's a cheap sob. Some of you might say, that is what he deserves for relying on Comcast. Fine. But what small business you know it gonna go through the expense of a T1/3 or fiber? That $29.99 a month cash register just became $300+ a month. Lovely. My point: out in the real world (in America) the infrastructure is barely stable. Until the carries seriouslly invest (and I doubt they ever will since they only provide exactly what they have too - I don't even want to get started on our TERRIBLE cell service in this country) in their networks, the "cloud" will be a site you share pictures of your dog.

bluedanieru 14y ago

>local hard drives will be history within 3 years Want to make a bet? Name your stakes.