The End of Apps (Premium)

At Build 2019 this week, Microsoft pushed its vision for “people-centric” computing, where the industry transitions from being focused on individual apps---Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the like---to being focused on people. In many ways, the software giant has been working towards this goal for years, if not decades. It started with Microsoft Office, which evolved from a basic bundling of related applications to become an integrated solution in which functionality from one application could bubble up in another as the user created then-new compound documents.

Few remember this, but Windows 95 attempted to end the app-centricity of personal computing by offering a document-centric user interface in which the user could think “new document” instead of “I need to create a document, so now I need to remember which app I use for that type of document.” That we still struggle with this same issue today, in particular on mobile platforms---“I need to share a picture with my wife, so now I need to remember which app I will use, and where it is on this multi-screen grid of icons”---is unfortunate and even a bit sad.

For Microsoft fans, of course, the term people-centric summons images of Windows Phone. It was a grand, if failed, experiment, but Windows Phone seemed like fresh thinking at the time. And if you could accept that the platform’s lack of apps wasn’t, in fact, the real driver behind this approach, it seemed innovative and smart: “I need to share a picture with my wife, so I should just use the Photos hub, since all of my compatible online services are connected there.”

Windows Phone was a dead-end for reasons we’ve already beaten to death. But that doesn’t mean that people-centric computing isn’t a good idea. Or that the future of what we now think of as apps relies on the industry, collectively, killing off that thing that we now think of as apps. That is, for apps to move forward, apps---as we now know them---must die.

More specifically, Microsoft this week announced Fluid Framework, its first step towards what it hopes will be a realization of this goal. For the Microsoft-centric fans in the audience, I’ll point out that this attempt represents its third major try at people-centric computing---with Windows 95/Office 95 and Windows Phone representing the first two, and that Microsoft---historically, if not superstitiously---tends to get things right on the third go.

Microsoft describes the Fluid Framework as “a new web-based platform and componentized document model for shared, interactive experiences.”

And that one sentence is very interesting.

At first blush, this immediately reminded me---and others---of OLE, Object Linking and Embedding, the technology behind those compound documents in Office 95. This comparison withstands scrutiny, and Fluid is, indeed, a modern solution to the same problems that OLE was trying to solve 25 years ago.

This new platform is not aimed at Wind...

Gain unlimited access to Premium articles.

With technology shaping our everyday lives, how could we not dig deeper?

Thurrott Premium delivers an honest and thorough perspective about the technologies we use and rely on everyday. Discover deeper content as a Premium member.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC