The Web — a Better Development Ecology?

Developing sites and online applications (for example, Google Docs) is different in many ways to developing applications for desktop machines. Technological differences aside, there is the speed of iteration.

What drives this innovation:

Usage data: Websites/web applications give developers continuos feedback on the parts of their UI used the most and how 

Fast incremental updates: Updates can roll out many times a day with their impact measured empirically

Mutation: Amazon.com randomly switches in slightly different sites to different people; this lets amazon.com practice Darwinian style evolution

Survival of the Fittest: The hassle of switching to a competitors app is very low

Imagine if desktop apps had these advantages! I would love to know what parts of an application are used more than others, how people are using the application and how multiple UI designs compare. If webapps ever replace the majority of desktop applications, then this closed feedback loop and iterative improvement could be why.

On the flip-side, development tools for desktop applications have been a lot better in the past. But in the last 2 years we've seen an explosion of solutions; Microsoft's Silverlight, Adobe's Flash and Air platform, Objective-J (really impressive), Sproutcore.

 

In the middle of these two approaches is the iPhone:

All applications auto-update 

There is a low cost of entry and exit to applications, not as simple as typing in a new URL, but much easier than installing new software on your PC. Purchase effort is minimal

iPhone apps are a smaller 'canvas' making it easier and faster for developers to improve and experiment

Perhaps iPhone will forecast the relative success of webapps/ 'cloud computing' as compared to desktop apps? Or perhaps all applications will grow to fit in between.

I don't know about you, but I'd be happy to everyday wake up to a slightly improved desktop application for the sake of ongoing improvement.