Saw this item on Gigaom.
George Colony, the chairman and CEO of Forrester Research, re-ignited a minor firestorm recently, with a presentation at the LeWeb conference in which he argued that the web is dead, and being replaced by the app economy — with mobile and smartphone apps that leverage the cloud or other services rather than the open web.
I have written here and here about the close correlation between Web application security and Web performance.
I know that Mr. Colony has sparked some strong sentiment in the community, in particular from Dave Winer:

If I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don’t need oceans because you have a bathtub. How nice your bathtub is. Try building a continent around it.

Of course, that is neither true nor relevant.
Many apps are indeed well connected, and the apps that are not wired-in, don’t have to be wired; the app is simply doing something useful for the individual consumer (like iAnnotate displaying a PDF file of music on a iPad or Android tablet).

iAnnotate turns your iPad into a world-class productivity tool for reading, annotating, organizing, and sending PDF files. Join the 100,000s of users who turn to iAnnotate for their PDF annotating needs. We designed iAnnotate to suit your individual workflow.

I became even more cognizant that apps may overtake the open Web over the past 2 weeks when Google Apps was going through some rough spots and it was almost impossible to read email to  software.co.il or access or calendars…except from our Android tablets and Nexus S smartphones.   Chrome and Google Apps was almost useless but Android devices just chugged on.
There is a good reason why apps are overtaking the open browser-based web.
They are simply more accessible, easier to use and faster.
This is no surprise as I noted last year:

The current rich Web 2.0 application development and execution model is broken.

Consider that a Web 2.0 application has to serve browsers and smart phones. It’s based on a heterogeneous server stack with 5-7 layers (database, database connectors, middleware, scripting languages like PHP, Java and C#, application servers, web servers, caching servers and proxy servers.  On the client-side there is an additional  heterogeneous stack of HTML, XML, Javascript, CSS and Flash.
On the server-side, we have

• 2-5 languages (PHP, SQL, tcsh, Java, C/C++, PL/SQL)
• Lots of interface methods (hidden fields, query strings, JSON)
• Server-side database management (MySQL, MS SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL)

On the client side, we have

• 2-5 languages ((Javascript, XML, HTML, CSS, Java, ActionScript)
• Lots of interface methods (hidden fields, query strings, JSON)
• Local data storage – often duplicating session and application data stored on the server data tier.

A minimum of 2 languages on the server side (PHP, SQL) and 3 on the client side (Javascript, HTML, CSS) turns developers into frequent searchers for answers on the Internet (many of which are incorrect)  driving up the frequency of software defects relative to a single language development platform where the development team has a better chance of attaining maturity and proficiency. More bugs means more security vulnerabilities.
More bugs in this complex, broken execution stack means more things will go wrong and as devices and apps are almost universally accessible now; it means that customers like you and me will not tolerate 2 weeks of downtime from a Web 2.0 service provider.  If we have the alternative to use an app on a tablet  device, we will take that alternative and not look back.