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Ten reasons why web applications aren’t the future

I posted a short while back on the ten reasons why web applications are the future, well this is a balance article that covers why, at the moment, theres still a whole host of obstacles to overcome. Read on…

As I see it you can group the problems into three areas. The first is psychological, the second is technical and the third is historic. Lets start with the psychological.

Individuals are, in many cases, not particularly trusting. This is probably the single biggest psychological hurdle that web app vendors must overcome. This problem gets worse the more useful web apps become, the reasoning being that for a web app to be truly useful it has be be aware of its users. To be aware of its users it has to hold some personal data. Take a calendar application for example. To be useful it has to know where you are, where you’ve been and where you’re going. People may have issues disclosing that information to a third party. Just think at how targeted the advertising can be based on that data.
The “Remote Friend” issue. This is something that I think is more prevalent than many would like to admit. Its a simple premise, in addition to not trusting web applications some people, many people in fact, simply have an issue with the fact that the application doesn’t reside locally. If it breaks, you can’t just turn it off and back on again, a stable of techies and non-techies alike.
The third issue is simply one of awareness. Even with the rapidly maturing Web 2.0 it is still the preserve of those “in the business”. As far as major penetration goes, its really limited to the major major players such as gmail. In this respect, the Web 2.0 is still an unknown quantity to the vast majority of Internet users.
There are a number of technical barriers standing in the way of web apps. The first is the very nature of the beast. Its a web application which means two conditions must be true, you must be connected to the internet and the web application must be up and running happily. Even in this always-on-world that’s not always possible.
Non-Standard standards. In an ideal world, a standard should be standard. It should provide a predictable set of rules to build upon. Unfortunately, given the competitive nature of the web, and in particular web browsers, each vendor tends to push the boundaries of these standards. In some cases it subtle, non intrusive enhancements, such as the extra CSS properties supported by FireFox. At the other end of the spectrum IE supports actions that other browsers can, and will not. This is supposed to be a hook, where if you want to use a certain site or service, you have to use a browser. The even worse side of this is IE’s non standard support of CSS which leaves to some sites simply not working, even if they are built upon standards. Until standards, sites and browsers can be relied upon its unlikely users will have a consistent experience. This is something that’s a given with desktop applications and provides comfort and security.
Moving goal-posts. This is another point that simply comes down to consistency. As mentioned in the above point desktop applications are fairly predictable and consistent. You always have the File/Edit/View bar, right click provides context menus etc. Compare that with the web apps we currently have and there is a marked difference. In fact, this is a problem that infects the entire internet. Non standard navigation and non standard interfaces can confuse users. It will also leave the impression that users need to “learn” a new way of doing things.
Reliability. This is closely tied into point 5. Its a common occurrence for me to encounter web sites that I simply cannot use. This is usually down to my browser (usually FireFox, sometime Safari, occasionally IE). Quite possibly the biggest problem is that the bugs that appear are sometime very well hidden. For instance, you could go onto a word processing we application and create a document, where everything works fine. Then, when you go and save it the save function doesn’t work as it uses some proprietary Javascript which your browser does not support. That’s a real downer, all your work is lost. All this despite the fact that the other features, like rich text editing, works fine. I’ve used many a service where the majority works only for one bit of functionality fails.
Limited Functionality. I mentioned in a previous post that web application vendors should concentrate on what makes web applications great, the fact that they embrace when is good about the web. Given the limited nature of the web, even with technology such as AJAX and Flash there still has to be an acceptance of the fact that a web application simply cannot do some of the things desktop applications can, not at this point in time anyway. For some, the missing functionality will be something they cannot live with. Others may feel like they are missing out. God we’re fickle.
I mentioned at the top of the post that one of the categories of reasons why web applications aren’t the future is historical. This may have sounded vague and confusing but really relates to a very obvious point. Historically, people are afraid of change, and moving to a web application is actually a pretty big change.
Likewise, historically companies like to keep things in house and under their control. This presents one of, if not the biggest hurdles web apps need to overcome. For any application, the key to success is getting sales. For many applications the way to achieve sales is getting companies to buy into your product. This represents a huge market. The problem here is that companies like to be in control of their data. In many cases their data is their business. This leaves many reluctant to use web applications to manage this data. Without breaking into this market web applications will struggle to achieve the necessary sales (or users) to be successful.

This post was written on Saturday, September 16th 2006 by Simon T and has been categorised under Opinion , Technology , Web 2.0. The trackback URL is here or you could add a response. If you really want to you can Digg this story or add it to del.icio.us, Technorati Cosmos, Blinklist, furl or Reddit.

One Response to “Ten reasons why web applications aren’t the future”

ACTUS Says:

January 12th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
That’s all well and good for desktop replacement apps, but what about apps that are only enabled by the Internet? For example, a community exchange for people to share timesheet reporting. If I work for one company, and you for another, there is a need for the “common ground” to facilitate such an app. All social networking and community-based services have this requirement. It is up to the publisher to build trust, but the app can’t exist as a desktop. It requires formatted communication that only the Internet can provide.