>>>>Nope... the battle now is between SL and Html5....
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>>Others might argue that this "fight" mainly concerns <5% of the smart phone market predicted by Gartner to fall to <4% by 2014, with the real battle between iOS and Android. Theoretically you could do a SL app for Android but phone developers have been drawn to optimized tools for a particular platform- I say "optimized" because graphical apps can drain a phone battery very quickly without specific optimization, including SL apps for WinPhone fwiw. You can already get optimized cross-platform products, e.g. database tools with versions for both iOS and Android.
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>>>> within 5 years, there will be no SL, ASP.Net, Lightswitch, etc.... there is a merging of technologies taking place and I believe the ultimate inheritor will be a markup based, generated language that runs both on web and desktop and combines all these features into a single platform with no need for anything else.
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>>That would be something, wouldn't it? Perhaps the desktop metaphor won't survive either as people learn to love their devices that make much better use of voice and speech-to-text, since those are more natural for humans than tapping on keyboards laid out to suit technologies that were profoundly obsolete for most of our working lives.
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>As I'm sure you know, the QWERTY keyboard was specifically designed to prevent keyboard typists from going too fast and jamming the keys together.
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>Smart phones do have the advantages you mention. They also present the world visually on a screen 2 inches by 3 inches. That's no final solution, either.

It is for many applications. In many corporate apps, there is a comparatively small number of desktop apps (seats) and a HUGE number of apps running on "hand-held" devices. Many apps must run on both these days. There are still commonly two versions of the same app being developed - the move to one app, run everywhere hasn't really become the norm yet.