DaveNet: Desktop Websites

My question is, if things are moving back away from the servers and back onto user's machines, are users going to want web applications anymore, or are they going to favour real GUI applications?

Also, what about handhelds? It was getting close to handhelds being able to use a lot of these centralized services on the road. They don't have the storage to keep many applications installed.

Once the application is on your desktop, you can't take it with you. Unless... the application is designed to allow itself to be "transported" to a central server and work in centralized mode while you are away from their desktop, and back again when you're back at your desktop.

Few people have a laptop, and while not many people really take advantage of being able to do XYZ (Blogger, for example) on the road (like from an internet terminal in a cafe somewhere), those who do are special users to covet, IMHO, because they are the future.

The lesson of the Dot-Com era is those users are too expensive to covet, right now. No more cake-and-eat-it-too...