The timelines and tactics may vary, but when corporations try to create web technologies or walled-garden distribution platforms or runtimes, the outcomes have always been the same.
Since the early days of the web, large corporations have seemingly always wanted more than the web platform or web standards could offer at any given moment. Whether they were aiming for cross-platform-compatibility, more advanced capabilities, or just to be the one runtime/framework/language to rule them all, there’s always been a company that believes they can “fix” it or “own” it.
Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React.
Through all of it, Web Standards continue to thrive. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript have never moved fast enough because collaboration and agreement isn’t easy or fast. Web Standards aren’t thriving because of any magical feature or capability. They’re thriving because of agreement and compromise.
Speed and rapid innovation can be good. Improved capabilities make development better and easier. And yet, each of those attempts by corporations to single-handedly “upgrade” the web have failed–while also playing a role in pushing things forward. They left their marks on the web–for better and worse.
Looking at a scale of thirty years and feeling like the progress has been slow feels absolutely wild. When the underlying platform increases its ease-of-use and capabilities by leaps and bounds every decade, that doesn’t feel like it should require patience. When that platform is almost universally available and accessible, it’s almost scary how quickly it has improved.
Every single programming language and framework in the world is the result of someone or some corporation believing they can do better. And they should absolutely keep trying to. If, however, the entity is aiming to own something that’s designed to be shared and universal, they will have failed before they’ve begun.
If their motivation is to bypass cooperation and compromise in the name of speed or aspirational dominance, they may experience modest success by some measure, but they aren’t creating something to bet a career on.
It’s not about raw speed or innovation and never has been. It’s about collaboration, agreement, and compromise. Web Standards provide humanity with a shared communication platform that’s not owned by any single entity. It’s de-centralized by design, and it’s precisely that lack of control that makes it work.
Web Standards evolve and improve with exhausting care and consideration. Moving slowly is a feature not a bug.
Through decades of learning about and building on the web, there’s one blog post and one statement from that post that continues to linger in my head. It was written in a different time and context, but it continues to resonate.
…a glacial pace isn’t all bad, especially if you’re driving off a cliff (which I gather we are). Driving off a cliff at a glacial pace affords you the luxury to turn around. I loves me some glacial pace.
All of the corporate-driven attempts have focused on speed and pushing the limits, and none of it has stemmed from making the web better. From a financial perspective, I can see why they’ve all been motivated to try, but from a career perspective, betting on corporate-driven web technology has never been a good long-term bet.
Nobody would be excited to have a resume that shows they were an expert at each of at Java Applets, Macromedia/Adobe Flash/Flex, Microsoft ActiveX/Silverlight, Google Angular, and Facebook React.11Yes. Google and Facebook. The innovation is fascinating, but the churn is debilitating. The shiny new thing can be fun, but that’s the problem with shiny new things. There’s always another one.
Through it all, HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript have been constant. The ease with which any human on the planet can reliably access and read a web document from thirty years ago on any device with a browser today is beyond beautiful.
On the other hand, when creations from less than a year ago require making changes to the original document, untangling and upgrading a rat’s nest of conflicting dependencies, installing a specific version of a runtime or build tool, and then figuring out how to open it on a device that may or may not support it, isn’t a formula for success.
Those attempts can be useful or interesting for exploring new frontiers, and to some degree, it’s even necessary. But given the track record and staying power of shared web standards, we shouldn’t conflate that exploration/innovation with “the future”. We’ve all read that story, and the sequels have only gotten worse.
None of this is to say that the web can never or will never be replaced in part or in whole, but if or when it happens, it’s not going to be based on a land grab by large corporations.
And while it may take another decade, even the various app stores will likely see similar fates despite their current positions. They’ll either evolve towards web standards, or web standards will reach a point where where the app stores can’t justify their out-sized cut.
It may take longer due to the “competition” being more orthogonal, but while profit-driven entities invest resources on moats and walls, the web will move forward–incessantly investing in ways that benefit all of us. That’s what the web does.
As with all walled gardens, the web will interpret the App Store as damage and route around it.
Collaboration. Agreement. Shared systems. Slow and steady. It takes a little longer to get there, but the diversity of insights, opinions, and goals that take us there inevitably provide much better odds of arriving somewhere with longevity.