Apple’s trademarked “There’s an app for that” slogan has become ubiquitous, inspiring countless newspaper headlines, a few Sunday sermons, at least one country song, a Sesame Street video and even a website devoted to generating snarky “app for that” jokes. However, the impact apps are having on the way we live and work is no joke.
The proliferation of application ecosystems to support smartphones, tablet PCs and other mobile devices heralds a new architectural framework that, according to the tech advisory firm Forrester Research, will one day replace traditional computing models. These new apps deliver rich experiences in an always-on, lightweight form that people can't resist, resulting in a new model of computing that Forrester calls the “Application Internet.”
Forrester Research CEO and Chairman of the Board George Colony says the App Internet will dramatically alter the web as users know it, force today’s leading technology vendors to adapt to a new business environment and affect every job function in the business technology organization. And despite industry’s preoccupation with cloud computing, Colony says that a standalone cloud or web solution is not the web architecture of the future.
“Two ways of computing have dominated over the past 20 years,” Colony writes in his Forrester blog. “The first I'll call the ‘Microsoft model,’ where local personal computers do most of the work. The second model is the web/cloud model, in which most of the work happens on remote servers. Both are outmoded. The Microsoft model fails to leverage the economies of scale in the cloud; web/cloud fails to leverage the exponential growth in the power of local storage and processors.”
In Forrester’s view, App Internet architecture leverages powerful mobile devices to natively run applications that take advantage of resources on the web or in the cloud. Moving rich application features off back-end servers and directly onto client devices will require a dramatic shift in the way applications are developed, sold and delivered.
The appeal of mobile apps among users is undeniable. The research firm IDC projects the total number of mobile apps will reach 1.3 million by the end of 2011, compared to only 75,000 applications for personal computers. Berg Insights suggests that mobile app downloads will continue growing at a compound annual rate of 56.6 percent through 2015, when nearly 1 trillion apps will be downloaded globally.
According to Colony, Apple has established leadership in the App Internet space, and web-centric companies such as Google and Facebook are risky bets in the App Internet market due to their overreliance on web-based technologies. Forrester estimates that the App Internet market was $2.2 billion in 2010 with a compound annual growth rate of 85 percent through 2015.
To succeed in this market, other established leaders that are borderline contenders in the market, such as SAP and Oracle, must determine how they are going to price these apps, and PC vendors such as HP and Dell must reform the PC experience to focus on app stores, which will be on every connected device in the future and serve as the keys to the Internet. Microsoft has important pieces to enable the App Internet — such as its application framework Silverlight — but must transition away from the old desktop licensing model to a world of low-cost, dynamic applications.
“The future is not written. Any or all of these vendors can change their strategy and move toward App Internet,” Colony said. “Microsoft, Dell and HP are candidates for that.”
