The Web is the Next Platform (1995)

This is gold<p>&gt;&gt; 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&#x2F;P6 Windows machine, the 2&#x2F;3rds of homes that don’t have a PC may find the $500 machine pretty attractive!

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&#x27;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.<p>Java transformed the way people thought about these things. Microsoft didn&#x27;t like Java and they didn&#x27;t like competing browsers because they were reasonable platforms.

Super interesting to read about all the technologies (... MediaView? MOS? RPC for... webpage-like things?) &amp; the way they imagined the future to look like before the web (... which is so obvious to us now that we can&#x27;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, &quot;payments&quot; (for which we still don&#x27;t have a standardized solution; we sell user data instead).<p>Also, knowing CSS, their statement of &quot;layout for the web is much easier than for Visual Basic&quot; is kinda... endearing.

As a lifetime CRUD programmer&#x2F;architect, I have to say that the current web standards have been nasty to productivity-oriented CRUD. Desktop GUI&#x27;s are still more productive and easier to develop. We de-evolved.<p>The web really needs a GUI markup standard, something like YAML but with more interactive features. Emulating real GUI&#x27;s via HTML&#x2F;DOM&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;JS keeps failing in practice. They &quot;break&quot; too easy when new brands&#x2F;versions of browsers come out. There&#x27;s too many layers to get right and browser vendors don&#x27;t always cooperate. A &quot;GUI browser&quot; that focuses on GUI&#x27;s and only GUI&#x27;s is needed so that distractions for other domains, such as social networks, don&#x27;t get in the way.<p>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.

&gt;&gt; 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.<p>I honestly feel lack of this is what killed IE in the eyes of developers.

It&#x27;s incredible how it is visionary, articulated and spot-on and yet:<p>&gt; 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.<p>They still want to strangle and submit the thing to their will and their will only.

I&#x27;m happy about how web platform has progressed so far. You will be surprised how powerful it has became: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whatwebcando.today&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whatwebcando.today&#x2F;</a>

This blog looks strange on a mobile.

So, what&#x27;s the next platform?