About time they see it! I've been pushing native, Internet apps over web since the beginning. The reason: native apps can be faster, leaner, more flexible, more portable, and more secure. Most things I can do to boost one of these metrics in a native app I can't do in a web app. Let's put this in perspective: my 1998, 200Mhz P2, 64MB RAM machine's native apps did more than modern web apps and with fewer problems. And could connect to people and use presentation layers... just like the web!
One writer argued the reason the Web took off was a standard, usable presentation format (HTML) combined with easy distribution (hyperlinks) and instant updates (connect for freshest version). This spread across both users and platforms. Its continual improvements gave it new features. To this day, the standardization and easy distribution makes it easier to push content to most users via a web browser.
Yet, even big Web companies such as Facebook are switching to Internet-style apps for mobile and Internal use. That's saying something. I guess they don't want around 500 bytes of HTTP overhead to send 1 byte of data. The best solution is a portable platform that solves the presentation, linking, and updating issues that web did. There's a number of older vendors and startups doing this. Hopefully we'll see more take-up and network effects on that side of things.
Note: Anyone still thinking the Web was the best route to go, but wanting native advantages, should Google Tannenbaum's Globe distributed toolkit that supplemented Amoeba distributed OS. They even ported the Web to run on top of it and side-by-side with its applications. Compare work like that to the web of the same time period and you'll see why Web is inherently inferior due to bad (or misappropriated) design. It always will be to a comparable, native product.
One writer argued the reason the Web took off was a standard, usable presentation format (HTML) combined with easy distribution (hyperlinks) and instant updates (connect for freshest version). This spread across both users and platforms. Its continual improvements gave it new features. To this day, the standardization and easy distribution makes it easier to push content to most users via a web browser.
Yet, even big Web companies such as Facebook are switching to Internet-style apps for mobile and Internal use. That's saying something. I guess they don't want around 500 bytes of HTTP overhead to send 1 byte of data. The best solution is a portable platform that solves the presentation, linking, and updating issues that web did. There's a number of older vendors and startups doing this. Hopefully we'll see more take-up and network effects on that side of things.
Note: Anyone still thinking the Web was the best route to go, but wanting native advantages, should Google Tannenbaum's Globe distributed toolkit that supplemented Amoeba distributed OS. They even ported the Web to run on top of it and side-by-side with its applications. Compare work like that to the web of the same time period and you'll see why Web is inherently inferior due to bad (or misappropriated) design. It always will be to a comparable, native product.