These kinds of discussions remind me of a PC Magazine Editors'
Day we held about a dozen years ago. We had a panel of columnists on
stage, and someone asked about OS/2. John C. Dvorak, always one for a
quick answer, said, "It's dead." There was a bunch of arguing on stage.
The next question asked about Apple, which was then in a very tough
period, and Dvorak's reaction was: "It's dead." And so on through the
rest of the panel -- whatever the question was, John had the same
answer. It was quite amusing. But in general, such conversations haven't been particularly enlightening. Once you get past the headline, the Wired story
points out the growth of Apps on things like the iPad and the iPhone,
and how video is now taking up more bandwidth than "Web" content. That's
disregarding the fact that most video is accessed through Web sites
like YouTube and Hulu. If you add that back in, my guess is you'll find
that Web traffic as a percentage of Internet traffic has actually grown
in the past couple of years because peer-to-peer client traffic is a
somewhat smaller percentage.
The Wired cover story, "The Web is Dead,"
has driven a lot of discussion in the tech world this week -- probably
due more to the provocative title than anything else. In many ways, it's
like the conversation earlier in the year sparked by Steve Jobs' comment that the tablet would eventually supplant the PC, and that the PC was dead. Note that PC sales look likely to grow by 20 percent or so this year.
To read the full, original article click on this link: The Web is Dead. So is the PC. So What? - Forward Thinking by Michael J. Miller
