Apps vs. the web: Are they enemies or allies?

George Colony, the chairman and CEO of Forrester Research, re-ignited a minor firestorm recently, with a presentation at the LeWeb conference in which he argued that the web is dead, and being replaced by the app economy — with mobile and smartphone apps that leverage the cloud or other services rather than the open web. That sparked some strong responses from longtime open-web advocates such as RSS pioneer Dave Winer, who argued that apps are not the future, and others who compared them to the “interactive” CD-ROMS of the 1990s.

Do apps necessarily mean the death of the web, and if so doesn’t that mean we are losing something important? Colony (whose presentation is here and slides are here) argued that the “app Internet” is the future in part because of the continuing increase in computing power — both in the cloud, where giant server farms store and process our data, and in the devices we hold in our hands (in the 1990s, according to Forrester, the iPad2 would have been one of the most powerful computers in the world). But bandwidth hasn’t kept up with these changes, said Colony, and therefore the web as we know it has to give way to a world of apps that process and display the data coming from services in the cloud.