There is no point in launching a “web app store” just for the sake of countering Google’s move. The web is a pretty good way to distribute web apps already, and if there is going to be a new distribution mechanism, it should have clear advantages over the status quo. In the case of the Chrome Web Store, Google’s blog post cites a few concrete advantages: easier discovery of quality web apps, increased permissions for installed apps and a new business model for developers (specifically, selling apps directly to users).

Easier discovery is a no-brainer, but of course this could be accomplished by a simple web app directory that links directly to various apps on the web. There’s no need to “install” apps to achieve this. There has to be more to a web app store than this. In particular, I love the idea of charging (optionally) for apps. Developers need to eat, and plastering web pages with ads shouldn’t be the only way for them to monetize the fruits of their labor. At one point I thought long and hard about starting a business around a marketplace for Prism web app bundles.

So I agree broadly with Google’s vision for their web store. But we can do better. For one thing, we can be more open, as Jay suggests, rather than using the store to lock users into a specific browser. In addition, we can take advantage of Prism’s much more mature and technically sophisticated platform for adding value to web apps when they are installed locally. After all, Google is promising to deliver something “later this year” whereas Prism web apps like Zimbra Desktop are already being used by tens of thousands of users every day.

I’m proud of what we’ve achieved so far with Prism despite limited development resources. Now is the time to start experimenting with other ideas as web apps continue to meld with traditional desktop apps. How should web apps be discovered and delivered? What does it mean to “install” a web app locally? What new capabilities (and associated APIs) are needed for web apps to rival their desktop equivalents, beyond what is already offered by HTML5? How might a web app payment model function? I believe Prism would be a great vehicle for Mozilla to tease out and play with potential answers to these questions.

Yes, of course it will be a bad thing. Why should Mozilla bother creating Prism at all? Why don’t we all just sit back and let Adobe, Microsoft and Apple work their magic? Yes, let’s do that. Who cares about freedom, we want magic. While we’re at it, let’s make Firefox proprietary software. Who cares about freedom when YouTube owns all our videos and Flickr all our photos?

Well, Pseudonymous (if that’s your real name): first of all, I didn’t mean to imply that open standards and open source software are bad. On the contrary, I’m a long-time member of the Mozilla community. I love open source. Certainly from the perspective of a software developer it is hugely beneficial to be able to drill down into the code of the platform you are using to debug problems and gain a better understanding of what is going on under the hood. This is the main reason why rich ecosystems grow up more easily on an open source foundation.

And, indeed, I’d probably be less keen on proprietary solutions if open alternatives were not available. As I said yesterday: “Adobe will be hard-pressed to take undue advantage of its technology’s popularity since we can always fall back on healthy competitive alternatives (both open and closed).” But just because open software is an essential ingredient in the magic mix that is the web, this doesn’t mean that we should automatically reject proprietary software, and it was this attitude that motivated my rant. Traditional profit-motivated companies have plenty to bring to the party, and I’m afraid that innovation and progress would suffer if they weren’t allowed to do their thing. Adobe is a poster child in this respect because they’ve contributed so much to the web. Be open, by all means, and if you can out-invent and out-implement Adobe while doing so then more power to you. But they are creating compelling software that provides unique value to both developers and end users, and for this they should be praised, not condemned.

Another key point is the tension between technically-oriented types (this means you, dear reader) and the average user. We geeks want our software open sourced, our iPhones unlocked, our novels creative-commonsed and our XBoxes modded to double as microwave-ovens-cum-garage-door-openers. Normal users just want stuff to work with as little fuss and muss as possible. With the notable exception of Firefox, open source projects haven’t been particularly successful in addressing the latter group and — newsflash! — they are orders of magnitude more numerous than we are. Before you condemn Adobe and other evil capitalist pigs for not catering to your every nerd whim, spare a thought for those who see technology as a (scary and intimidating) means to an end, not their life’s obsession.

If web applications liberated us from the domination of a single company on the desktop, why would we be eager to be dominated by a different company on the web? Yet, this is what Adobe would have us do, as would the many who are (understandably, along some dimensions, anyway) excited about Flex? Read Anne Zelenka’s post on Open Flash if you don’t think that Flash has an openness problem. I’m not eager to go from being beholden to Microsoft to being beholden to Adobe.

Ted’s thesis is echoed by many proponents of the “open web”. Microsoft has had a huge influence on this way of thinking both because they were so dominant for so long and because they abused this dominance in so many unappealing ways. The web has finally liberated us from Windows bondage, and naturally we are in no hurry to find ourselves locked once again into a proprietary environment.

Nevertheless, there is a worrying tendency to promote the open web for its own sake as well as for the real advantages that it brings. This is particular true among the open source software crowd, which sometimes treats openness with a quasi-religious reverence that ignores the many benefits of the proprietary approach. Since nothing should be accepted on faith alone, let’s explore some counterarguments to the “open is good, closed is bad” doctrine.

First of all, Microsoft’s hegemony in the 80′s and 90′s was an aberration. It stemmed from a lock on distribution (through OEM agreements with hardware manufacturers) and a lack of plausible competition at the platform level. This gave Microsoft exceptional market power, which it duly abused. None of this is applicable to vendors like Adobe. People use Flash because there are compelling applications built on top of it, not because it was pre-installed on their computer when they bought it. And Adobe will be hard-pressed to take undue advantage of its technology’s popularity since we can always fall back on healthy competitive alternatives (both open and closed).

And the flip side of the open vs. closed debate is that proprietary approaches can be instrumental in advancing innovation. This was even true of Microsoft, who arguably accelerated the widespread adoption of personal computers by providing a much-needed uniform platform (a standard, if you will) for independent software vendors. Of course, many will counter that open ecosystems are most conducive to innovation, as in the piece by Anne Zelenka cited above:

Decentralized, emergent development models work better than central planning for broadly applicable technologies like Flash. Why? Because the people who might come up with the next great enhancement to Flash may not be within Adobe. Flash is a foundational technology for Internet development–because of its broad use, it should have an equally broad community evolving it for the future.

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It is a bit akin to the difference between a centrally planned and a market economy. In the centrally planned economy, the oligarchs and eggheads who make decisions think they know better than what the aggregation of individual decisions might come up with. In fact, market economies beat centrally planned ones over and over again. You have a certain dynamism in market economics that’s not present in centrally planned one. The same goes for the development of technology.

Seen from the perspective of Flash, this is doubtless the case. But with respect to the broader web, the market vs. centralized planning argument takes on a different dynamic. In order to benefit from the Darwinian principles that Anne evokes we want as many parties as possible in the fray, duking it out for dominance. One of the most powerful forces in real markets in the profit motive, and it is naive to think that this consideration evaporates just because we are talking about software and the web. In other words, letting companies deploy their proprietary technologies and fight for profits will enrich the web by offering more and more compelling alternatives.

This may be anathema to some, but a level-headed look at what Adobe has accomplished reveals much to evoke envy in its open counterparts. Flash runs uniformly on all platforms, unlike Ajax (which still requires much tweaking and tailoring depending on the operating system and browser being used). Its interfaces are beautiful, sometimes jaw-droppingly so. While the open crew are still hashing out standards for video on the web, Flash video has crushed the competition and enabled a generation of popular video sites like YouTube.

Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich made an interesting point about Flash and other closed formats:

I assert that there is something wrong with web-like “rich” formats that aren’t hyperlink-able or indexable by search-engines. You could argue that these bugs could be fixed, and Flash is wisely becoming more URI-addressable and view-source-able over time. But it still ain’t the Web. It is not hand-authored, easily tweaked incrementally, copy-and-paste-able. It’s hardware.

Well I would assert that some hardware-like characteristics would do the web (and computing in general) a great deal of good. We’re leaving the last vestiges of the hobbyist era behind us. If normal people are to get full benefit from the web, it has to be as easy to use as a refrigerator or toaster. Is it really a bad thing if Adobe and others like it are bringing us closer to this state of affairs?