Well, we tried that for awhile. The web was mainly good for documents and if you had a program it was done with Flash.
And then people were making websites entirely in Flash.
And then people realized that was a bad idea because Mobile, and everything got better.
Until the App Store came along. Fine, so now program delivery has been separated from document delivery, but every document provider that used to just be a website now requires you to use a special program from the App Store instead of using a web browser or some other generic "document viewer". Or, at the very least, you have to tell them you don't want it every time you visit their website.
The problem isn't that the web is a bad document delivery system -- it's not. The problem isn't even that the web is just as good at delivering programs as it is at delivering documents. The problem is that there are a large number of people who know nothing about best practices and are way too enthusiastic about making things look flashy. They create documents and they don't care how you want them to look. If that means they have to create a Program instead of a Document, that's fine with them.
Download our app, and let us read your entire contact list and send out SMS messages as you, and read and post to Facebook as you, and do whatever else we want to anything for any reason.
And then people were making websites entirely in Flash.
And then people realized that was a bad idea because Mobile, and everything got better.
Until the App Store came along. Fine, so now program delivery has been separated from document delivery, but every document provider that used to just be a website now requires you to use a special program from the App Store instead of using a web browser or some other generic "document viewer". Or, at the very least, you have to tell them you don't want it every time you visit their website.
The problem isn't that the web is a bad document delivery system -- it's not. The problem isn't even that the web is just as good at delivering programs as it is at delivering documents. The problem is that there are a large number of people who know nothing about best practices and are way too enthusiastic about making things look flashy. They create documents and they don't care how you want them to look. If that means they have to create a Program instead of a Document, that's fine with them.