> The web won because it has the least barriers to entry for a new developer and solves a lot of difficult problems > that the old-school application stack had

> The web won because it has the least barriers to entry for a new developer and solves a lot of difficult problems > that the old-school application stack had. This is all from my history and point of view so I'm sure a lot of people will disagree. In my hindsight, the web won in the enterprise because deployment was free. When the web was developed, in the early 1990s, vendors charged per seat for PC runtimes (Powerbuilder, Unify Vision, etc.). You got zero-cost runtimes, free client distribution (IE on windows) and application version control (server-sode managed code). The low barriers to entry probably exacerbated the hodge podge, but I'm happy to bill hours cleaning up after people.