Last summer, in a much-read cover story, Wired proclaimed that the Web is dead. Chris Anderson, the magazine’s editor, argued that loading pages in a browser is passé. The future, Anderson wrote, is in downloadable apps, which have several advantages over the Web. They’re fast, they can be customized for specific purposes, and—perhaps most importantly—people seem to have no problem paying for them, which means that software and media companies have an incentive to keep creating more. Few of us, meanwhile, pay for Web content—and our reluctance, Anderson argued, spoke volumes about what we really want from our computers: “Much as we love freedom and choice, we also love things that just work, reliably and seamlessly.” More>>