Not so sure. The Internet and the browser make many scenarios very easy (Joel Spolsky makes a great case). Jeff Attwood, with ego firmly in hand, named a law af

Not so sure. The Internet and the browser make many scenarios very easy (Joel Spolsky makes a great case). Jeff Attwood, with ego firmly in hand, named a law after himself that says any software that can be written, will be written for the browser. While entirely possible, that's an extreme view, and maybe not very realistic. The web's "viability" as you put it, will naturally shrink into its natural niche. First and foremost it's probably good to remember that the web relies on a transport layer. There are apps (web sites, email and so on) that live on top of that. That transport layer is what makes the web compelling, but that's not the only possibility (or future) that that layer affords us. I think the real viability question is not the web, but rather data ownership. Users' personal information created Facebook, user knowledge created Stack Exchange, and user behaviour generates Google's income (amongst many examples on the web). Users that are the raison d'être for these web sites have no power over, or control of their data. And it's that fact that will shift (and on mobile, already is shifting) focus back to native client apps that are completely decoupled from the browser. These apps use the Internet as a transport layer, in much the same way a browser does. The shift then, as I see it, is towards one in which the balance of power over data is maintained in a natural equilibrium. In that world, the Stack Exchanges will do well online because their acquisition of user knowledge benefits users directly. The Facebooks and Googles will (I imagine) remain relevant, but not in the way they'd like to be. In conclusion, what the article posits will probably come to be, to a degree and for a while. But it ain't the future.