Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting.
The above is a fascinating chart (from a fascinating article) giving more rationale for not being overly web-centric in your digital publishing strategy. It shows that there is much more to digital life than the Web. It shows that the web is a declining portion of what people are doing online and through the connected devices that define today’s lifestyles.
I always find it ironic to think back to how pompous the traditional print newspaper folks acted in the early days of web compared how pompous web folks act today. It took newspaper folks 400 years to build up to that level of “we are king and all others lesser,” and only a little more than a decade for Web folks to develop the same attitude. I guess Internet years really are like dog years!
But really, more than pomposity, web-centric thinking and strategy probably just reflect denial that something someone has worked so hard to become so good at is suddenly not so important. And that in a very familiar story.
