Are Desktop Applications Dying?
saucelabs.com
saucelabs.com
"The iPad team worked with the SproutCore team to provide native hardware acceleration to the JavaScript layer..."
Yeah, that couldn't be further from the truth. MobileWebKit has had hardware accelerated 3D transforms since before SproutCore existed. And that's the only part of the entire equation that is hardware accelerated. Plus, you can also do it at the Obj-C level, it's not something unique to MobileWebKit.
For many things, JavaScript on these mobile devices is fast enough. But let's not pretend it compares to native app performance. It is, in fact, 50-100x slower. It just turns out that in a lot of cases you don't really need that speed (which is true in lots of environments -- look at ruby).
Desktop utility and shareware apps are dieing. Why use a TO-DO list on your computer when there is remember the milk? Email I can see a good reason for it being in the cloud. Is Photoshop going to be replaced? AutoCAD? 3D Studio? Even MS Office?
No.
In short: it's both the eco system, the low learning curve, the penetration of the internet, and the ability to gain more insights into what people are doing with your app that native apps will have a hard time competing with.
There is not one single example of an application which has both a webapp version and a desktop version, where I prefer the webapp version. Not one. The closet I could come to that was preferring the real Facebook site to their iPhone app. But even there, on the iPhone, I prefer the app to the website.