The Web is Dead. So is the PC. So What?

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 that resulted after Steve Jobs said earlier this year that the PC was dead, and the tablet was its likely successor. Note that PC sales look likely to grow by 20 percent or so this year.

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 onstage, and someone asked about OS/2. John C. Dvorak, always one for a quick answer, said, "It's dead," naturally prompting an argument. The next question was about Apple, which was then in a very tough period, and Dvorak's reaction was again: "It's dead." You get the picutre. 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 pointed 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.

In general, though, I agree with those main points. Apps are becoming more important for Web traffic, and video services that don't use browsers are growing rapidly and are going to consume a lot more bandwidth in the future. That's hardly surprising.

Article authors Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff made separate but parallel arguments that the world is moving from open systems, like the Web, back to more closed environments. That's a much more interesting and debatable topic. I think they are right in many ways, though I would note that there has always been, and will likely always be, a tension between open and proprietary platforms. Indeed, I can argue that the tension between these camps - with open platforms providing more innovation, but proprietary ones doing much of the polishing - has been positive for the technology industry since the dawn of the PC. I doubt I'll ever see the world adopt either strategy completely.

And that's the problem with the whole "____ is dead" meme. The Wired authors don't actually say the Web is dead. It's just a snappy headline. Even the folks who make the argument don't really believe that the Web is literally dead. They'll admit that it's still growing, but say it's not growing as fast as it once was, and it's no longer where we're seeing the biggest new applications.

The people who say the PC is dead, or who are talking about a post-PC era, aren't really saying that PCs won't sell going forward, but just that it won't see the kinds of growth it once did, and won't be the focus of innovation. I can argue that the PC hasn't been "the center of innovation" for the past 15 years, but if you compare today's machines with the ones from back then, you'll see some huge innovations and improvements.

So, while the focus of innovation - and start-ups - is changing, it seems to be the Web, and the PC, and most any technology that people say is "dead," actually stays alive for a long time. People just like to declare technologies dead. Recall that even mainframe computers - declared dead by tech pundits when the PC first showed up more than 30 years ago - remain a multi-billion dollar market.

Of course, all technologies eventually either "die" or evolve into something new. At this point, we can declare Windows 95, which came out 15 years ago this week, as dead. But, despite Microsoft's best attempts to get people to migrate, Windows XP is still alive and kicking. It looks like Windows 7 may eventually replace it in corporate use, but that's still years away.

As John Maynard Keynes famously said, "In the long run we are all dead." But technology has a way of sticking around a lot longer than pundits to predict.

Originally posted on PCMag's Forward Thinking blog.