Web apps get the ultimate endorsement: Windows 8
With the Internet's importance steadily gaining, it's not as if Web programmers needed an ego boost. But Microsoft has given them a major one anyway with a radical change coming in Windows 8. — The next-gen Windows will come …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Windows 8 story has been building quietly for over a year: reports in February 2010 that the next Windows would be "completely different" and "mind-blowing", followed by word in April 2011 of an integrated App Store. What CNET adds is the substance behind the adjectives — the radical change is an embrace of web applications at the heart of the OS itself.
That lands just days after Microsoft closed its $8.5 billion Skype acquisition and confirmed a yearly update cadence for Windows Phone, so the company is visibly reorganizing around connected, service-style software rather than shrink-wrapped releases. With an executive also hinting at an autumn 2012 ship date (unconfirmed), the web-app endorsement frames what the App Store and the redesigned shell will actually be for.
First-order effects
- Web developers gain first-class standing on the world's dominant desktop OS: their applications can sit alongside native software rather than living only in the browser tab.
- Microsoft's planned integrated App Store now has a dual mandate — distributing both traditional binaries and web-based apps — which changes what the storefront has to catalog, sandbox, and monetize.
Second-order effects
- Independent Windows software vendors face new competition from free or cheap web apps occupying the same shelf space, pressuring the packaged-software pricing model.
- Rival platform holders (Apple with its own Mac App Store push, Google with Chrome) are pushed to clarify whether they treat the web as an app platform or a threat to their store economics.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the operating system's value migrates from hosting installed binaries to providing the runtime, distribution, and identity layer for web applications — making the browser engine and the store, not the Win32 API, the strategic chokepoints.
The trend: Operating systems are converging on web technologies as a primary application platform, with Microsoft's Windows 8 turning that convergence into mainstream PC doctrine.