*snip*
>I didn't say that it would. I will say that the "traditional" desktop isn't dead. Will people try to put applications that don't belong in an intranet based environment on an intranet? Yep. Eventually, however, I believe that the "pendulum" will swing back the other way to some degree.
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>One of the reasons I think this is the reason that the personal computer came into being in the first place. It put the power to manipulate information in the hands of the people, not an IS/IT department. Web based apps are great where they're appropriate. However, there are numerous similarities to the old mainframe/dumb terminal environment. Implementation of applications that don't belong in the Web environment, directly or indirectly, will take that power away from the people and/or make their jobs more difficult rather than easier.
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I thought I was the only one thinking this. < s > It seems like you have to have some years on you (which you and I do) to see the cycle. It used to be that computers were SO BIG and EXPENSIVE they had to be centralized. With the PC and LANs came the power of distributed processing. Now PCs are so powerful, we are starting to swing back to centralization.

I don't doubt that as browser-based technology advances, we will be forced to centrailize more and more applications. However, I also see (as David joked about) that as PDAs become more advanced, we will probably move to distributed again.

I also see (in my crystal ball) a new "desktop" application: Transactional Offline applications. The desktop will be just a stop gap. Processing will be done at the server, downloaded to your notebook (PDA??) and then you will work on whatever offline. At this point, you don't have to have to stay in the browser world. You can go with the more sophisticated (currently) WinAPI technology. Then when you connect again, you upload all your work and that gets processed to the whole.

The world can't go all the way to centralized processing because people don't stay in one place all the time. We constantly move and with the complexity of things now days, we can't wait until the next time we can connect to do our work. You have to be able to do it en route.

>I give credit to Microsoft for being a highly responsive company. If the "Big 3" auto makes had been as responsive to consumer needs as MS has shown itself to be, there'd be a lot fewer Hondas and Toyotas on American highways today.

I think that arrogance played a key role in this. Auto makers had been in business for so long that they forgot what it was like when they young and had to fight for living. They lost the edge. It may not have been that they didn't want to be responsive, it may have they didn't know how anymore. IBM was the way.