I think there’s a TCO argument to be made against the proliferation of the App Internet. The more companies build their own apps, the more maintenance work they’ll need to do, the more employees they’ll need to maintain their apps and the further the innovation drain. I know this is a harder concept to quantify and intellectualize but I’ve seen it first hand in 20 years of working with large corporation on “legacy” IT projects. The App Internet opens the door to many more legacy apps.

This argument never features into any young developers mind because it takes years to see the decaying effect of legacy infrastructure in corporations (plus, many app developers prefer the sexy world of consumer apps).

To be clear … I think that the App Internet won’t disappear overnight. I also think certain apps will always be more effective built natively. But the same is true of today’s non-mobile computing. Still, most apps need not exist. Long live the Mobile Web.

[I agree.]