INSIDE MOBILE: Why Direct Web Access No Longer Matters

I'm sure this week's column title caught your attention. You might have even asked yourself, "Is this guy losing it or what?" While my family figured that out a long time ago, there's a very important message in the title, but it needs some explanation.

The fact that the Web no longer matters seems counterintuitive. The World Wide Web, which gives us the "www" front portion of Website names, has become the center of the digital universe. Every organization and many individuals have built Websites and that's certainly going to continue for many years.

Why the Web no longer matters, though, is that more and more of us (and millions of machines that communicate as well) won't ever directly access the Web any longer. Instead, we'll access something else that provides us with the information we want—and that intermediary will access the old, traditional Web.

Others are coming to the same conclusion. One analogy to this situation might be nuclear power generation: no one really touches the power generator's core. Instead, we touch the heat and power that is generated. The core is still built but we really don't witness or see it.

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