I’ve often described technology in terms of a pendulum. For example, sometimes the hardware is farther ahead of the software. This can be seen when screaming fast new computers come out with massive graphics capabilities. This usually means everything looks better, and runs faster. In reality, things actually look about the same, and the increase in speed can be almost unrecognizable for most tasks. Once the software is rewritten to take advantage of these new capabilities, things get more interesting. The graphics do look better with the new version of the software, and slowly but surely the new features start to bog down the machine to the point where we are ready for updated hardware. What goes around comes around.

Another example is happening now with apps. Once upon a time software was king. Everyone needed a software application to get things done on a computer. With the advent of the Internet, and the whole web 2.0 thing, the ability to get things done was less dependent on what software you had, and moved to which services you subscribed. Anyone using Google Apps? Life was grand as we all moved to a world of device independence.

Then along came the iPad (and other mobile devices), and the world changes again. Everyone is downloading apps, 3 billion and counting, just for iPad apps. So we are all back to the world of software, and device dependence again. Of course, if you stick around long enough, that too will change. HTML5 brings us the promise of device independence again. We’ll see. I suppose apps (or applications) have their place, just as well as web services. If you aren’t an app fan, just wait a bit. What goes around comes around.