
The Web is the Next Platform (1995) - spencerwgreene
https://benslivka.com/2017/08/15/the-web-is-the-next-platform-5271995/
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kylek
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
Very prescient iPad / smart phone prediction there.

~~~
giantrobot
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
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
> 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.

~~~
jacobush
What I think is interesting is how the data that matters is on the server.

Besides, if you think about it, you make my argument for me - “they” have the
power budget, the mobile device has not. Think holistically.

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bachmeier
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.

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bluishscreen
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.

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tabtab
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.

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osrec
>> 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
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.

~~~
tootie
That's not it at all. You're talking about the IE tax in a post-IE world. Look
at US v Microsoft in 2001 and the early Browser Wars. IE had crushed Netscape
(via shady business practices) and had market domination. For a long time, all
projects were IE-first, then you would worry about niche upstarts like
Firefox. It wasn't until the launch of Chrome and Safari and the resurgence of
Apple and OSX that there was any plausible alternative. It was at that point
that standards and compatibility really became paramount. IE wasn't "extra
work", it was the primary objective.

~~~
pavlov
_" > IE had crushed Netscape (via shady business practices)"_

No, IE was actually a much better browser in 1999-2000.

It crushed Netscape 4 even on web standards support. For example much of CSS
was terribly broken in Netscape.

~~~
jart
Hear Hear. I look back at supporting Netscape 4 in late 90's as equally
painful as supporting IE6 in late 2000's. It's difficult to imagine, but
Internet Explorer was superbly superior during that time. For example, the
Netscape4 window couldn't even be resized without needing to reload and redraw
the page from scratch.

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johnchristopher
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
So did this role end up in the hands of Google?

~~~
moonchild
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
> Extend phase

Chrome, AMP, "improved" HTML standards, platformization...

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wintorez
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
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.

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codenamepod
This blog looks strange on a mobile.

~~~
ci5er
Best comment evar!

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thorwasdfasdf
So, what's the next platform?

~~~
pictur
probably something that is not taken seriously

~~~
lioeters
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-...](https://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-
looking-like-a-toy) (2010)

