Wired's last schtick is dead. Long live....

Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine's editor, dreams up a new schtick with which to beat us every few years. First the Long Tail, then FreeConomics, the pattern is the same - lots of sturm und drang on the Wired platform, mo' PR off it, and then a book is out before the people who know it doesn't quite hang together can get a blog post in edgeways.

Anyway, with the Long Tail disproved and FreeConomics debunked and diluted to Freemium (or Paymiium, in the case of the book), there is a need for a new schtick to beat the Wired horse with. This is (possibly) that - "The Web is Dead - Long Live the Internet".. (To be fair, I understand that in the printed article* John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly give their ripostes).

[Update - the riposte is now online - styled as a Debate though i think Linkbate is more appropriate ]


Anway, the gist of the argument is that:

You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service.

You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.

Now this is really going to shock the young 'uns, but this is not so much a Brave New Thing as The Way Its Always Been:

(i) There was a time the internet existed before the Web

(ii) We have been using the Internet without the Web all this time - think email, VoIP, Adobe Air, online gameworlds etc etc.

(iii) This will continue, and in fact its not impossible to imagine that the Web is a temporary phase.

In other words the correct response to this thesis is "We know. And"?

(OK, the 'And' is that some very succesful Today Web companies will wither and some new Tomorrow App companies will prosper. But that was ever thus)

Now the reason for all this excitement is Video and Mobile Apps

Video is exciting not because it Loses a Lot of Money (or more accurately uses a lot of high quality bandwidth that no one right now pays for) but because it puts a lot of traffic on the web, and that must be a sign that all is well, right?

Mobile Apps (or Programs That Run On Your Own Device, as Apps used to be called in old money) are going to replace the Web in the way we access functionality (Better tell Google - after all, Microsoft Office is just an App, albeit quite a big one). Yes, gentle reader, the digerati of today have effectively re-branded the Olde Client/Server tradeoff debate to now be the Apps/Cloud debate.

The reason for Apps is not because Smartphones are smart, but because they are still dumb. If they were smarter, with bigger screens, and better UI like Laptops are we would use the Web much more on them. Its just that smartphones are smarter than dumbphones which could only use very small Programs That Run On Your Own Device, which are called Widgets. And the reason everyone is so excited about Smartphone Apps is because they think they will make tons of money from them. Like they thought with Widgets. Except they won't. Like they didn't with Widgets.

Now to be fair, Wired have worked out that all these new App environments are not quite as open as the Web (part of the reason they will not do as well as expected, but more on that later) but that too is hardly New news. Still, it tells you something about the Wired (Print) Edition's reader base. Not quite the Digerati as they once were, methinks?

Anyway, it will take about 12 months for the market to realise there is very little money in Smartphone Apps, so I calculate a Book by next spring should get in nicely before the Apps hype cycle rollercoasters on down

Update - as Gawker delights in pointing out, this whole thing is even sillier than at first glance:

- Irony 1: Wired released its cover story package first to the Web, on Wired.com. You won't find it in Wired's iPad edition, and it's not out in print yet. The death of the web might be the "inevitable course of capitalism," but it apparently pays better to deliver that news via a dying medium.

- Irony 2: Revenue is up at Wired's profitable website this year, despite a fairly severe reduction in staff last year. Yet Anderson, who has no control over Wired.com, writes that most Web publishers haven't been able to "reverse the hollowing-out trend of analog dollars turning into digital pennies... and by the looks of it there's no light at the end of that tunnel ." That tunnel being the one Wired, itself, is not in, apparently.

- Irony 3: At the same time, circulation — and thus revenue, almost surely — are down for Wired's iPad edition, which was approaching (and possibly even surpassing) 100,000 copies for the debut issue but has since fallen off — to less than a fourth of what it was, one source claims. However large or small the decline, it could certainly be corrected; dropping off from a big bang launch is common enough in print and online media alike.

But Wired's iPad tumble does raise the possibility that Anderson is speaking as much from his hopes as from his analysis when he writes, "We are choosing a new form of Quality of Service: custom applications that just work." The iPad team belongs to Anderson, after all (unlike, again, the web team).

- Irony 4: Isn't this the guy who wrote a book called Free and noted, "You know this freaky land of free as the Web. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending?" Eh, maybe not so much; Anderson today writes, "Much as we love freedom and choice, we also love things that just work, reliably and seamlessly. And if we have to pay for what we love, well, that increasingly seems OK."

Even funnier, apparently Wired predicted the End Of the Browser in 1997 as well

There is Linkbait, and there is plain looking dumb...........

*I haven't bought the Wired print edition for years....