The Death of Binary Software: End User Software Moves to the Web

The World Wide Web is the most powerful medium for information sharing and distribution in the history of humankind. The use of the Web is rapidly spreading into many new areas outside its original intended use, including its use as a platform for software applications. So far, a number of obstacles have hindered the development and deployment of full-fledged, truly interactive web applications. However, new emerging standards such as HTML5 and WebGL are removing the remaining limitations and transforming the Web into a real software platform. In this paper we argue that the trend towards web-based software will cause a paradigm shift in the software industry from binary applications to dynamically delivered web applications. In the future, the use of conventional binary programs will be limited to system software, whereas the vast majority of end user software will be developed using web technologies. All this will imply significant changes in the development, deployment and use of software, and open up interesting opportunities in software engineering research as well.