Apple and the FT: The Web is dead! Long live the Web!

With the rise of the iPad and mobile phone apps, there has been a rush to write the epitaph for the Web. Much has changed in the last year, but rumours of the death of the Web were and are greatly exaggerated.

Tech bible Wired wrote:

Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services - think apps - are less about the searching and more about the getting.

To be fair to Chris Anderson of Wired, he did explain that he wasn’t predicting the death of the internet, the infrastructure on which the graphical interface of the Web sits, but the Web itself. However, on the way to the grave, the Web started to reinvent itself, blurring forever the world of apps and the world of the Web.

[caption id=“attachment_74777” align=“alignleft” width=“300” caption=“Games and HTML5 web apps can be downloaded from Google’s Chrome Web store”]  [/caption]

If you want to see the future of web apps, install Google’s Chrome browser and go to their Web store. A number of media companies have ported their iPad apps to the web.

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As I wrote recently, HTML5 is driving the future of the Web not only on the desktop, but on tablets, mobile and even smart TVs. New platforms create new opportunities for media companies, but if they had develop apps for each platform, the cost of development quickly outweighs the potential profit. As the Financial Times head of emerging technologies, Steve Pinches said when the FT launched its own HTML5 web app, “developing multiple ’native’ apps for various products is logistically and financially unmanageable.”

Besides, no one knows which platform will win. Many media companies in Europe and North America simply aren’t in the position to develop for a platform that may or may not be around next year. Some work has to be done to adapt apps for different devices and platforms, but a range of frameworks, many of them with open licences, are available to ease that process.

Cutting out the middle man

However, irrational exuberance about apps was never just about tech. It was also about business. The shift to apps on the iPhone and iPad also meant that media companies suddenly had to deal with a middle man between their content and their audiences: Apple.

Although the Financial Times been very diplomatic in their public statements, the company has had a very public falling out with Apple.

In June, the FT raised the stakes, launching an HTML5 web app that bypassed the need for the iTunes music store, a loud warning shot right across the bow of Apple.

They didn’t want to pay Apple the subscription fees the tech giant was demanding or cede control of its customer data. The data, rather than the fees, was the real deal breaker.

When the app launched in June, FT head of product development MB Christie told Folio:

By not knowing who are our customers are, we can’t give access to all devices, if you signed up. [Not giving the 30 percent cut of purchases] is a side benefit of not having to go through the Apple cycle. However, it would have been a different conversation if the data was available.

This week, the FT’s native iOS iPad app was pulled from iTunes all together.

The economics of digital content

I always saw predictions of the death of the Web as wishful thinking by journalists and media companies who saw it as a nail gun sealing closed the coffin lid on their business. The Web is a reality to be dealt with and, for those that understand that reality, there are opportunities.

Yes, digital media has fundamentally changed the economics of the media business. In the analogue past, media operated on the basis of scarcity. Newspapers and magazines were expensive to launch and maintain, and before satellite television, there were only a handful of channels. The victors in those markets were rewarded with de facto monopolies and princely sums of cash. Think Rupert Murdoch.

Digital media lowered the barriers to entry to media and eased distribution. Suddenly, we weren’t dealing with the economics of scarcity but the economics of abundance, some might say over-abundance. As internet sage Clay Shirky has said, “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity.

Many journalists and media moguls were openly hoping that apps would somehow if not recreate the business they had then at least allow them to get more people to pay for content. It still might work out that way. But the Web isn’t dead: it’s just changing. Media companies need to realise after two decades of watching the Web change the world, they now have to change with it.