Why You Should Not Follow the Mass

Three weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg called Facebook’s HTML5 app “one of the biggest mistakes if not the biggest strategic mistake that we made.” Following everybody was calling the death for HTML5. Self-named experts told me that our HTML5 app was nice and revolutionary but this was not important because you need to be native. They told me I was going against the trend... And of course you should also be directly present with native apps on all platforms.

Now a new study shows that news consumption is moving from apps to the web and the New York Times introduced a new HTML5 App. So HTML5 are IN and native apps are OUT. What?? Are this trends changing so rapidly, or what is going on?!? Of cours the Tech space is moving fast, but not so fast.. The problem is that when Techcrunch or some famous people writes something a lot of other news sites, and people just start to take one headline and look at it like a proven fact, even out of the context. If Mark Zuckerberg says HTML5 was a mistake, then HTML5 is OUT, HTML5 would be a mistake for everyone, and so on. But event then if you didn't just stopped reading at the headline, you would have realized that it makes completely sense for Facebook to have native apps, built with native code, but this doesn't mean that has to be true for all small startups. And it doesn't mean that the trend will be going to native apps. Most startups currently still focus on native apps as their core product, and this perfectly makes sens now as the app stores are a great distribution systems for their products. But as more and more apps will be available on the app stores, and more and more users don't want to install more apps, HTML5 apps will start to became more popular. On the PC once you bought most software in physical stores and now you just use them in your browser. Back at the time was the right decision to be present in that stores, but later on it was better to just offer the products over a website. The same I think, will happen with HTML5. The differences between HTML5 and native apps will become negligible for most applications, and the distribution advantage from app stores will vanish. This is just a normal technology cycle.

Another example of where a lot of people follow the mass is the adopion of metered paywalls on newspaper's websites. Just because for the New York Times a metered paywall might work (and even this is questionable), this does mean that this has to work for everybody. Does something that works for a international newspaper, with a lot of content and 30 million visitors, automatically work for a regional niche newspaper? (I personally think no) So a lot of newspapers introduced metered paywalls this year or will introduce them soon...And now we see first examples that metered paywalls are not working...

A swarm behaviour ensures survival for a lot of animal species, but I think as human we should also sometimes think on our own.