A short-lived trend on Twitter was to post an alert of someone’s death, preferably someone well known. For a while this wolf cry worked, shocking folks on the news of David Hasslehoff’s untimely demise and for a brief time vaulting the victim to the top of Google’s Hot Trends.

This time, the victim is a bit of heavyweight: Google itself. According to a widely-read article this week on the virtual pages of Wired Magazine, editor Chris Anderson predicted death of the Web,  the very realm in which Google lives and thrives.

Writers are easily victims of hyperbole, this article is no exception. Anderson himself pointed to a 1996 article that made much the same claim and obviously missed the mark.

This time, the article resonates more fully, as major changes in the cost of certain technologies, most notably telecommunications, memory and lithography, have allowed people to take their data with them on small portable devices.

Unfortunately, interacting with these devices is a bit troublesome without the help of certain, specialized applications. Getting a weather report, for example, is a bit difficult if one uses a mobile browser to access a website built for a widescreen desktop. Better to download a small application for $3.99 that brings Weather.com in a nimble, easy-to-navigate format.

How does this hurt Google? Or, for that matter, anyone else doing business on the web? Well, buying that program sends money to the developer and the vendor, but because it features no Google ads and uses no search engine, Google can’t benefit.

According to Anderson, these apps, which include everything from the Apple store, as well as other services like Netflix, Skype, and old-school TCP/IP protocols like FTP, are on the rise and will dominate the Internet.
I can’t subscribe to this prognosis, however. No other tool takes better advantage of the network started by DARPA in the 1970s than a web browser. Tim Berners-Lee, the R&D Magazine’s 1996 Scientist of the Year, is often credited with the invention of the Internet, but in reality he helped create the World Wide Web, which is also the name he gave to the very first Web browser. He and his team also developed HTTP to serve as an easy way to access information that was posted to networked servers. Of course, there was soon a push to develop the new HTML language so that the content could be presented in a more attractive and easy-to-use fashion. The Web as we know it was born.

As any who have dealt with the command line are aware, the Internet is so much more than what Internet Explorer (or Safari, or Firefox, etc.) can show us. There are a number of other  TCP/IP protocols at work, and machine-level communication is the ocean of while us humans skitter about on the surface. But nothing matches a browser for the ability to easily consume multimedia, and the future will many shapes

The biggest with the Web is that it is a poor place to generate content. The applications we use to create stuff, from Microsoft Word to MapleSim 4, require us to access our personal computers in a generally offline fashion. The browser--via Google, Bing, SaaS, and other cloud solutions--is helping transform this situation, but it’s a clunky solution that’s generally a disservice to users. The Web needs to operate as a virtual operating system, where we can access our files in an instant-on fashion, no matter where we are or what device we are using. The Web doesn’t need to die off. It just needs to adapt.