4 ms·

> All in all, this war is moot. Moore's law applied to bandwith, to device computation speed and to software evolution leads to this: http://xkcd.com/1367/ http

> All in all, this war is moot. Moore's law applied to bandwith, to device computation speed and to software evolution leads to this: http://xkcd.com/1367/ http://xkcd.com/1367/ Not really. If you have massively powerful devices and massively fast connections then you move to a situation where you've still got to address differences between the programming models and and the feature sets on the various devices. For a web app to have parity with a native app there are still significant technology gaps which need to be closed - offline working (moving in the right direction, still not great), native look, feel and functionality (difficult if you want it to run on multiple device types) and so on. Some of those will close over time, some may not. But harder to close off - I struggle to see how cross platform will every be much more than lowest common denominator given the consensus required on how to adopt new features as they arrive on phones. Apple launches TouchID, Samsung launch fingerprint scanning. How long before the W3C define a standard for that and the companies adopt it? How much time is that where native developers are at an advantage? The web is great and web apps will definitely be a bigger part of things going forward, but I think it's simplistic to assume that they'll take over. As for a present day Microsoft, I don't see that happening. Back then interoperability was a nightmare - if the person I wanted to work with wasn't running the same OS as me I was basically screwed. Right now I can collaborate with someone and generally speaking I don't care what they're running and it really doesn't matter.

pekk 12y ago
The technology gaps are going to take forever to close for two reasons. First, because the web as an app platform is a disorganized pile of bad hacks, which makes every fix harder. Second, the great point you made about how the web is bound by waiting for standards, then waiting for widespread compliance with those standards. This guarantees it's always far behind. And the pile of crap is only growing, making it more and more appealing to just leave the web behind for anything that makes it easier to get nice results.
- sergiosgc 12y ago
  > The technology gaps are going to take forever to close for two reasons. (...) The secret is that the utility curve of technology is not flat. For example: when processors ran at 4Mhz, doubling the processor speed to 8Mhz had a much different utility value than when they doubled from 1.5Ghz to 3Ghz. As such, even if the technology gap doesn't close, ever, the utility values obtained from each technology will close, to the point of indifference. You can already observe some of this utility curve flattening, if you observe the absence of game changing feature announcements on WWDC and Google I/O.
  - Tyrannosaurs 12y ago
    We can agree or disagree about whether anything announced recently is significant (I'd suggest if you're a user then application interoperability is major and as an iPhone 5S user I find entering a PIN after using the fingerprint scanner feels positively stone age), but I'd struggle with the idea that smartphones are essentially feature complete and nothing significant will be coming down the line in the next few years.

pekk 12y ago

The technology gaps are going to take forever to close for two reasons. First, because the web as an app platform is a disorganized pile of bad hacks, which makes every fix harder. Second, the great point you made about how the web is bound by waiting for standards, then waiting for widespread compliance with those standards. This guarantees it's always far behind. And the pile of crap is only growing, making it more and more appealing to just leave the web behind for anything that makes it easier to get nice results.

sergiosgc 12y ago
> The technology gaps are going to take forever to close for two reasons. (...) The secret is that the utility curve of technology is not flat. For example: when processors ran at 4Mhz, doubling the processor speed to 8Mhz had a much different utility value than when they doubled from 1.5Ghz to 3Ghz. As such, even if the technology gap doesn't close, ever, the utility values obtained from each technology will close, to the point of indifference. You can already observe some of this utility curve flattening, if you observe the absence of game changing feature announcements on WWDC and Google I/O.
- Tyrannosaurs 12y ago
  We can agree or disagree about whether anything announced recently is significant (I'd suggest if you're a user then application interoperability is major and as an iPhone 5S user I find entering a PIN after using the fingerprint scanner feels positively stone age), but I'd struggle with the idea that smartphones are essentially feature complete and nothing significant will be coming down the line in the next few years.