The scale and power of the Web today is mind boggling. The number of things you can do with it is, in theory, only limited by the number of things the devices connected to it can do. And today’s technology can do, well, almost anything. (Just imagine the technology of tomorrow!)

Someone makes something, puts it on the Web, and all of a sudden it’s available to everyone, everywhere. That’s the power of the Web.

As a discipline, web performance ought to be able to measure all those things—all the things that web technology can do. At the least, it should be able to speak to them, to give guidance and equip developers to measure and improve the quality and value they provide.

How should the KPIs of a progressive web app compare to those of an ebook, or an online game? What about real-time collaboration tools, or voice assistants? What about wearables, robotics, cars, and smart cities? The technologies keep expanding. What metrics should we recommend? What best practices?

Where will web performance be in 50 years?

We’ve only scratched the surface.

I hope the Web survives that long. Really, I hope the Web stays relevant that long. Will it? Who knows. Assuming it does, what will web performance have to offer?

Will we still be measuring load time?

Or will we have stretched our skills, our field of vision, to match the task ahead?

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P.S. For more Web inspiration, read Alex Russell’s Platform Adjacency Theory and The Core Web Platform Loop.