You may not have heard of them, but a little company in San Francisco called Adaptive Path has had an outsized effect on the Web we know. It's a consulting company that focuses on user experience--one of the first to make user experience its mission. Its team included an all-star list of thinkers, a who's-who of the Web.
So everyone who follows Web development was more than a little weirded out yesterday when Adaptive Path announced that it was selling itself to Capital One: a banking concern that's made an empire out of consumer credit card debt. It all happened so quickly, and so slowly.
Adaptive Path was an anchor tenant in the Web 2.0 land grab of the early aughts. Along with Six Apart, Odeo, 37 Signals and a few others, it drove a reimagining of the Web as a place where static pages would act instead more like dynamic applications. Websites would double as destinations for people to congregate and communicate. Adaptive Path gave a name to an emerging development trend. They named it Ajax, shorthand for a suite of tools that made web pages come alive and flow with action, and it exploded across the internet. It helped make user experience a thing everyone talked about.
Aside from web apps, Web 2.0's most notable feature was probably hype. All the companies trying to sell you an idea were also now also effectively operating industry trade publications. Web 2.0 was a hothouse of self-promotion---and knives-out backstabbing. The people who ran these companies all talked together openly online, many worked together in person, and hell a lot of them even slept together. Any company that wasn't blogging to reach out directly to its community (not customers: community) was bound for destruction, argued any number of people who worked for blogging companies that no longer exist in hundreds of smugly-written blog posts.
Those days are over. Six Apart (Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal) was absorbed into SAY media, before the brand was spun off and acquired by a Japanese company.1 Podcasting darling Odeo morphed into Twitter after a near death experience. A few months ago, 37 Signals (Basecamp, Campfire, and kind of Ruby on Rails) changed its name to Basecamp, to focus on its first and most successful product, dropping support for everything else. And now Adaptive Path, slayer of conference decks, destroyer of established ways of doing things, is a division of Visa or something.
I mean, banking! Credit cards! It's like the least progressive with-it Web whatever thing ever. Even Adaptive Path co-founder and chief creative officer, Jesse James Garrett admitted it's weird.
"We were frankly surprised by it too," he told WIRED. "When they came along and wanted to meet with us we were like, sure, we’ll have a meeting. I’m not going to go out on a date with you but we can have coffee."
But instead, they got married. And it's also kind of, almost, maybe not surprising? Despite the Web 2.0's tendency towards self-promotional hype, the actual experience principles it championed were mostly spot on. Adaptive Path led much of that push and in doing so was one of a handful of companies that fundamentally changed the way we use our screens.
Increasingly, we interact with Banks solely on screens. When was the last time you spoke to a teller? Do you even know where to find a deposit slip? So it's no surprise that there is an arms race going on among banks to recruit digital design and experience talent.
"This move is a bit of a shot across the bow at Capital One's competitors to show how seriously we take this and how we’re going to move in the marketplace," says Garrett.
He also says it will operate as an independent entity within Capital One, helping it transform not only digital products, but also physical and cultural ones. Mortgage packets, phone systems and even banking centers will get its UX treatment. Adaptive Path will remain, Garrett says, a presence not only within Capital One, but also in the community.
"The only thing that’s really changing operationally is that we are now only consulting for one client. Nothing will be different in the office here next Monday from last Monday," Garrett told WIRED. "Our public presence is part of what they like about us. They want to be exposing to the world the extent to which design is continuing to grow as a part of their culture."
Maybe so.
In 2010, WIRED published a cover story written by then editor in chief Chris Anderson with the provocative title, “The Web Is Dead.” That Teutonic proclamation was received with lots of snark and derision, even (and especially) at WIRED’s among own Web team. But his basic argument---that the open Web is rapidly being overtaken by dedicated apps---is now indisputable.
Of course, the Web lives on as an important platform, but Adaptive Path's exit from the Web as an independent entity feels a lot like the end of an era. Web 2.0 has been dying since the day Apple opened the doors to its app store on iOS. A way of thinking about openness and interoperability has given way, too. What's in your wallet? It's probably a banking app.
1Correction 18:28 EST 10/15/14: An earlier version of this story incorrectly noted that Six Apart was still a part of SAY Media and no longer made any of its former blogging products. The new Six Apart continues to update and support Movable Type.
