If you're in the mood for (mostly) content-free hyperbole today, look no further than The Atlantic's Closing the Digital Frontier. If you're not, allow me to summarize:
- Traditional media/entertainment (nearly) brought about its own demise by buying into the early hype about information "freedom."
- The web browser is dead.
- "Curated" internet access--i.e. controlled by Apple, Netflix, Big Media, etc. is the future.
- The near-monoculture in the U.S. of wireless carriers, smartphone OSes, will leave consumers with no choice but to shut up and pay up for the "best" stuff.
- Curated apps and paid media will kill Google and search/aggregation in general.
Rebutting point by point:
1.) I call "Historical revisionism." The RIAA and MPAA hardly bought into the "information is free" mantra. Moreover, I recall paywalls throughout my experience with the web. I remember a fully "curated" World Wide Web. (It was called AOL.) I remember Disney buying InfoSeek and basing search results' "relevance" on who was willing to pay. That and the "portalization" of search was--IMLTHO--what drove us into the clean interface and impartial rankings of Google. And so I would even make the case that what is still killing big media and big entertainment is not pirated content, but rather the reduced barrier to entry for so-called "amateurs" who are equally or more talented than the "professionals." Thus, the demise is much more a matter of competition. That and the consumer figuring out how much they'd been fleeced for mediocrity--if not outright suckage.
2.) The browser is the fastest, easiest and most generic way to get information online, period. And that even with the royal pain that is cross-browser support. Also, smartphone disk space is limited, and expecting someone to give up drive space for a single-function app is pretty darned arrogant unless it's impossible to deliver the same functionality in a web browser. Is there any way Twitter can improve your experience with accelerometer (meaning Wii-like controls)? Don't think so. Ditto for Facebook, looking up phone numbers, finding a restaurant, GPS, etc. A bootstrapped software company is not about to invest months of coding in Objective-C and praying for Apple's laying-on-of-hands to replicate the same functionality that web forms could provide in two days with Dreamweaver and an upload to GoDaddy. If MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. had gone the "application" route, we never would have heard of them, much less their mobile versions.
3.) Curated, paywall access works for content that's expensive to produce. For everything else, there's YouTube and long tail marketing. Getting the consumer to pay for streamed content is hobbled by data capping and attempts to control what's routed through The Tubes. In essence, Apple's set itself up in the business equivalent of a love triangle. On one hand, it's in bed with AT&T until 2012. On the other, it's wooing the content providers (Netflix as well as more traditional publishers and media). The interests of Apple's two paramours are diametrically opposed: One makes money pushing as much data to the consumer as possible, the other by limiting it. The consumer pays three times--for data, delivery and device. Which I personally don't have a problem with, but when each member of this love triangle is pushing what the market will bear, independently of the others...that's an oligopoly ripe for disruption. Particularly when, with three hands held out for each byte streamed to every device, the consumer is still expected to put up with advertising for the privilege.
4.) (And speaking of disruption...) Why Michael Hirschorn assumes that the boundaries of the various markets stop at the US border I can't fathom. I'm not knocking good ol' Yankee ingenuity--not in the least. But devices that sip battery life, add bulletproofing for spotty connections, are solar-chargeable, use freerer platforms (e.g. Android, Linux) and otherwise make virtues of scarcity are more likely to come from overseas. You know all those people who are manufacturing our gadgets or writing the code for them? After all these years, a few of them just might...just maybe...have figured out how to create stuff without Western input. If we're lucky, the usurious attitude of the Western titans even provided a little extra incentive to stick it to The Man. (Then we can sit back and enjoy the spectacle of watching Bollywood try to figure out what Hollywood hasn't. I'll pop the popcorn.)
5.) The amount of information stored on servers is not static, much less decreasing. Someone has to make it findable; someone needs to tie it together in relevant ways--with "relevant" being a highly subjective term. Individual applications are, by nature, too partisan, too one-size-fits-all. Certainly there will be niches focused and valuable enough to justify installing a new app. on a mobile device. But a niche isn't valuable until you are already aware of it...and know enough to assess the value of the information. And where would you find that online? Oh yeah...that would be through search and Wikipedia and blogs and maybe Stack Overflow-type sites. You know, all that stuff whose wake is being planned.
But I guess what chaps my hide--even more Hirschorn's smug assumption of the native superiority of brand-name content and distribution systems--is the collective view of the world as passive consumers dropping quarters into an internet that resembles nothing so much as a vending machine or pinball game.
Bottom line: The proverbial "killer app" is rarely created in a management retreat; still less often is it created when Joe Consumer somehow connects to Jane CEO and says, "Make me x." No, a "killer app" happens when its creator thinks of a unique way to solve a problem--even if the "problem" is mere boredom--and gets off her/his (figurative) backside long enough to solve it. Preferably in the most convenient, efficient, and perhaps even creatively satisfying manner possible. Any pipe-dreams on the part of the Big Boys of setting up more toll booths on the internet are not integral to the design. Unless the telco, entertainment, and hardware giants collude (and, less likely, cooperate) to create the One Web To Rule Them All, creators will win.
