>In hindsight we were all privileged to be part of the world's move from early Fox days when my first development machine had 1 meg RAM and a 20 mb drive (yes mb not gb, younger folk!) towards modern phones/devices that make no great distinction between RAM and persistent storage, with my current phone coming with 64GB and allowing another 256GB SD. These numbers are high enough that memory/storage barely features in consideration for business apps in 2018.

The deal breaker there is that browsers allow only limited amount of storage. I believe it's in the neighborhood of 5 megs of data per domain for most browsers. That won't get you very far for large storage, but it's enough for offline capture of data and sync back up later.

> Rube Goldberg fascination with complexity.

Man is that ever right on... The current JavaScript framework tooling pipelines are truly insane with 200 meg node_modules folders just to build the bloody apps. It works but man is that ever a house of cards - come back to a working app after a few months and what was working just fine, now doesn't build any more. It's insane...

I'd hate to be a Web developer getting started today - I'd be able to get stuff done perhaps but have no clue how any of the underpinnings work and that's scary to think about.

This is one reason why I mentioned Blazor (and other WebAssembly based tools). This promises to potentially get away from the special hell that is JavaScript. The language part of JS is fine and I don' tmind that so much but the tooling and management aspect is unsustainable going forward me thinks. Web Assembly lets us perhaps get away from that mountain of pain and brings other more mature tools that had this stuff figured out 10 years ago, and bring runtimes that include a reasonable base feature set so you don't have to include 50 small libraries to get some basic string and date functions into a JS app ;-)

This is ripe for new tech to upend. Ultimately though I think the next wave of cool tech won't be with languages - it'll be around better UI and components. Whoever breaks that dead lock we've been in for 10+ years will own the Web world.

>Meanwhile I find myself going back to the future: having been an early adopter of the cool web, current strategy is to bring apps that involve detailed user interaction rather than just data viewing, back towards Windows GUI to be exposed widely via RDS or cheaper alternatives now cropping up. Easily hosted and managed by clients, or Azure ticks the box for those expressing interest in SaaS.

I don't know. I think Windows looks like it's dying a slow death. The Mac is no better. Linux - well they never had anything worth running a desktop machine on.There has been zero desktop innovation in the last 10 years for either platforms. Microsoft looks like they are planning to choke off desktop apps and force everyone into the Universal Apps hell, with all the limitations that entails. Windows S seems like they were testing the waters - I see a not so distant future where that's all you can run on Windows. It's not a pretty picture for desktop. The latest Mac Rumors seem to point at Apple wanting to do the same thing, merging iOS with MacOS which will also lock the Mac down. For business apps this is all probably fine, but for productivity and developer tools that need full control of the machine this is a big blow...


+++ Rick ---