I’m sure the first reaction to this week’s column title caught your attention.  You might even have asked, “Is this guy losing it or what?”  While my family figured that out a long time ago, there’s a very important message in the title, but it needs some explanation. 

The fact that the Web no longer matters seems counterintuitive.  The World Wide Web (which gives us the front portion of the name of most websites – ‘www’) has become the center of the digital universe.  Every organization and many individual people have built or will build websites, and that’s certainly going to continue for many years. 

Why the Web no longer matters is that more and more of us (and millions of machines that communicate as well) won’t ever directly access the Web any longer.  Instead, we’ll access something else that provides us with the information we want -- and that intermediary will access the old, traditional Web.  Others are coming to the same conclusion.

One analogy to this situation might be nuclear power generation: no one really touches the power generator’s core.  Instead, we touch the heat and power that is generated.  The core is still built, but we really don’t witness or see it. 

Let me show you why accessing the Web will very soon no longer matter.  This is primarily due to mobility: mobile phones never touch the Web directly (see the diagram).  All mobile phones with Web access go through a mobile server that, in turn, actually interacts with the Web.  Web pages are realigned, mobile ads are inserted, video is encoded differently, and lots of processing is done to make the mobile Web experience acceptable. 

Let’s try to put this in perspective.  In many areas of the world outside the U.S., the mobile phone is the only way to access information.  People in these areas don’t have broadband access at home.  Thus, their mobile phone becomes their ‘life line’ to getting information.  There are around 6 billion people in the world, and 60% (3.6 billion) currently own a mobile phone.  Less than a third of these people have broadband. 

In addition, SmartPhone applications are becoming the primary information interface to mobile users.  The apps may access the internet or the mobile Web server, but the user doesn’t access the Web directly.

As tablets become more common for everyone, people are going to use more publishing applications to read content from newspapers & magazines, as well as listen to music that comes from servers like Pandora.  Thus, direct Web access will take a much smaller percentage of everyone’s time.

Other reasons that direct Web access no longer matters pertain to the interfaces, interpreters and mash-ups.  Interfaces provide a local app on a PC or Mac, and the user experiences something beneficial. The app may communicate with the Web, but the user doesn’t.  Some examples include DropBox which enables file sharing among groups of people -- you put your file in the folder locally and it’s stored on the Web. 

Multi-person games run in a similar manner.  You play the game using a local application that gives you a rich graphical experience, and the application connects the other users over the Web that you don’t see.  Mash-ups take content from many different places and present a unified set of information.

And finally, another major reason that direct Web access doesn’t matter – people are spending less time ‘on the Web.’ There are more choices available to people and, thus they spend less and less of their time inside the Web browser.  More time is spent on email, posting to Facebook with the phone, playing games, & reading material in digital publishing applications. 

Sure, direct Web access is still important today; however, it is becoming less important all the time.  There’s a movement to put more apps ‘in the cloud’ but people are not always online, and it’s my belief that local access (PC, tablet and SmartPhone) provides the best user experience.  The local app can access more resources on the Web (cloud) to make my local experience better. 

I think from this analysis you can see that my title is appropriate:  The time spent directly accessing the Web no longer matters.  What does matter is getting the job done, enjoying the game, or efficiently (& locally) reading the material that’s important to you. 

Written By:

J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D.
Principal Analyst
Mobile & Wireless
MobileTrax LLC
gerry.purdy@mobiletrax.com
404-406-5309
 
Disclosure Statement: From time to time, I may have a direct or indirect equity position in a company that is mentioned in this column.  If that situation happens, then I’ll disclose it at that time.