> they succeed by having adequate tech and a huge pile of marketing money.
The key to the web's success is its completely unparalleled levels of accessibility. All you have to do is remember a domain name and you have a portal into anyone's personal network application on any device; that feature can never be topped regardless of the tech's quality or the marketing budget.
I don't think that's true, certainly people rely on search engines more now than ever, but people still know the domain names of their most common destinations e.g google, facebook, reddit, amazon, gmail, ebay, github, youtube, pornhub aol etc. It's also pretty common to see people visit domains directly after being instructed to do so by advertising provided the domain name is easy to remember e.g. hotels.com, indeed.com, apple.com etc. Also, individuals quickly become familiar with sites that they visit habitually; certainly most users of gofundme pateron, paypal etc are not doing a google search to discover these URLs, they just type them in (and often the browser autocompletes it for them)
I was perhaps hyperbolic, after all I remember the domain name to access the network application, but I'm a programmer and I only do it for a limited number of applications. Otherwise I use one of the applications I remember to find the ones that are not among my most frequently used. In this way it calls into question the whole killer app thing of having a domain name, because in most cases you need something sitting between you and the domain name that gives you the right domain name for what you want loaded.
On the flip side, I've seen and heard of other people who have seen kids who type facebook in to the search bar to go to facebook.com. What fraction of people do this right now? What fraction of new internet users do this? It would be interesting to find out. Perhaps in the not too distant future, most internet users will be doing this.
> that feature can never be topped regardless of the tech's quality or the marketing budget.
Never? That's a silly thing to say in the computer industry. I'm going to guess that we'll have an alternative to the web sometime in the next 20 years.
"Never" should really be "not in the foreseeable future", but certainly not within two decades. The web is the apex of incumbent systems and there is just no clear path, desire, incentive or business need that would facilitate a transition to an alternative, especially as the web approaches full feature parity with "native" code. The only people that have irreconcilable problems with the web are a certain subset of programmer, but for most people an alternative is unnecessary and perhaps even the opposite of progress.
> The web is the apex of incumbent systems and there is just no clear path, desire, incentive or business need that would facilitate a transition to an alternative, especially as the web approaches full feature parity with "native" code.
I don't know about that. Considering the possibilities with AR/VR, quantum computing, machine learning, smart fabrics and environments, and the like and seems to me there could be an incentive for an alternative inside a 20 year timeframe. Will all that run over the web, or have a web interface? I tend to think at some point big technological changes will make an alternative appealing.
But maybe not and it will all be web assembly apps writing to a canvas container ;)
The possibilities for multimedia and gaming are quite interesting, but there is no reason to suggest that this technology will have any impact on an any possible alternatives to the web.
>quantum computing
Quantum computing is in the "unforeseeable" category, we're not even entirely sure that quantum computing will ever be practical (as far as general purpose computing goes), certainly it has no implications with regard to an alternative to the web.
>machine learning
Same situation here. The machine learning discipline is expanding quickly and yielding very interesting developments, however, there's just no reason to suggest that machine learning will provide the impetus for a transition into a web alternative.
> smart fabrics and environments
Same here too.
All of these developments are orthogonal to the state of the web and none of them really provide any mechanism or incentive to create or move to an alternative.
The key to the web's success is its completely unparalleled levels of accessibility. All you have to do is remember a domain name and you have a portal into anyone's personal network application on any device; that feature can never be topped regardless of the tech's quality or the marketing budget.