AI is the End of Apps ⭐
We’re so focused on how AI is changing the apps we know and love that we’ve lost sight of what’s really happening here. But this isn’t about changing apps, it’s about changing everything. And when it comes to apps, there’s only one endgame here. Apps are going away. We’re looking at the death of apps as we know them.
If you pay attention to Cory Doctorow, the person who invented the perfect term enshittification, and you should, you know that one of the themes he brings up repeatedly is that the only computer we know how to build is what he calls a Turing-complete universal von Neumann machine. There’s a lot that goes into that name, but to overly simplify it, what he means is that all general-purpose computers can run any program (app) that can be written for any general-purpose computer regardless of architecture or operating system. He brings this up in the context of enshittification, of course, as platform makers specifically and artificially limit which programs (apps) can run on their computers. The most extreme version being mobile platforms (iOS and Android), which are controlled by their makers.
When you think about the personal computing platforms you use, there is likely so combination of classic desktop platforms (PCs, Macs) and mobile platforms (iOS, Android). One of the many ways in which these platforms can be compared or even identified is through their apps, these familiar interfaces we use each day. And the ways we use these apps today are likewise familiar, with mouse/touchpad and keyboard being most common on the desktop and multitouch being most common on mobile. These are direct interactions: You launch an app and you use that app by directly interacting with it.
Back in August, Windows lead Pavan Davuluri appeared in an in-house Microsoft video about his team’s vision for the future of Windows, and the focus was largely on how AI will change the interaction experience in this desktop platform. And in his view, the Windows of five years from now will be increasingly “authentic” (whatever that means) and “multimodal,” an AI term that I believe he was purposefully contorting to use in an interaction sense. That is, in addition to the mouse/touchpad, keyboard, pen, and multitouch interactions we have today, we will have “voice and vision.” These are interaction types we see today in Copilot for Windows 11, albeit in early and ever-evolving forms. And Copilot, you may recall, was once described by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as the new Start menu, the “orchestrator of all your app experiences.”
Windows enthusiasts/power users of a certain age, meaning roughly my age, reacted in horror to both of these revelations, made two years apart. That’s what we do. But with the context of history, it’s useful to understand what each meant by these comments.
I can’t say that I knew what to think of Nadella’s Start comments at the time—remember, this was just as Copilot was m...
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