A lot of programs that people use in the “enterprise” — office jobs, back office for manufacturers, small business offices, etc — are basically web sites. They are applications that are written to run in web browsers, using a handful of technologies to produce HTML and Javascript that make your browser something close to a desktop application. There are many advantages to this approach: browsers are ubiquitous and run on essentially every machine; such applications dispense with the problem of deployments — to get a new version, all you have to do is deploy new code to a web server; users are familiar with browsers and how they operate, so your application’s learning curve is much smaller. there are plenty of downsides to web applications as well, but so far, in corporate America, the benefits have outweighed the costs. Microsoft might be trying to change that.
As mentioned before, Microsoft’s new universal apps are an attempt to allow developers to write one application and run them on every kind of screen imaginable. Combined with their tools to semi-automatically convert Android and iOS apps to universal apps, and you have a pretty clear plan for making it easy for developers to write applications that run wherever their clients need them to. Obviously, this has a potential huge impact for businesses. In the past, It is the browser was the best way to support applications running on tablets, phones and desktops. Microsoft’s universal apps could change that. If you can write a full application that works on the phone, the desktop and the tablet, then the drawbacks of the web application become a little less easy to bear.
And web applications do have the drawbacks. They tend to be slower than native applications, whether you are comparing them to the desktop or to mobile applications. They tend to be more limited in their user experience. They obviously require something close to all ways on connectivity to work. They can be difficult to write and support — while browsers are present on every device, various versions of browsers support different standards, and thus different sets of functionality. Companies get around this issue ether by spending a lot of time writing code that works across multiple browsers, limiting functionality choices for their developers, or by locking themselves into one browser, which can limit functionality and very often makes life difficult for you when browser upgrades happen or when new features that would solve a problem for you are introduced in other browsers but not the one that you picked to live in. Ironically, that most often happens when people pick to live in Internet Explorer.
Writing universal apps can solve those problems. You get a native experience on every screen and all of the benefits of native applications. Of course, today you can already do that but most organizations choose not to. In part because many organizations run a flavor of Unix on their central systems and thus do not have Microsoft expertise in house. In addition, the deployment benefit of browser based applications are significant. With the move toward small, frequent releases, having to manage just the web and app servers for deployments is no small benefit. And, of course, writing a web app is the easiest way to ge tit to turn on all of the screens your employees/partners expect them to run on. That is a lot to overcome.
Microsoft appears to have made that last item invalid, however. You can write apps that are faster, more stable, give a better user experience and run on every screen. Deployments, too, can be managed better. A combination of “smart client” technology and mobile devices training users to expect frequent updates to their applications eliminates some of the deployment advantages web applications have over their competition. Suddenly, depending on a browser for support doesn’t seem as clear cut as it does today.
It is entirely possible that Microsoft could significantly erode the presence of web applications in corporate environments. I doubt they will go away entirely, but for the first time in a long time, Microsoft may be giving corporate IT departments a reason to think outside the browser.