as for "What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection?" that seems like a solvable problem to me. (and web application can work offline these days)
* Google maps won't work very well offline. You don't have the entirety of the map titles cached locally or the direction database/logic.
* It's the same with Gmail. IIRC, you don't have access to your archive of email while offline.
* If I have all my financial data in Mint, do I have access to the full functionality of Mint or just access to my account info / transaction history? If not then it's sort of worthless.
* If I upload all of my photos directly from my camera to Flickr or Facebook, do I have access to those offline?
I'm not poo-poo'ing the idea of webapps, I'm pointing out their weaknesses because it seems that most people are too focused on their strengths while ignoring their weaknesses.
My other point is this:
As we more more and more of our data onto servers controlled by other people, what are we giving up? Sure we can keep backups of the data just in case the remote data is lost (for whatever reason), but what happens when the only means of using that data is a webapp? Then the backup becomes useless without the service. (i.e. I could be offline and have all my financial data in some sort of backup format from Mint, but how do I grok the raw data without a local tool? If all the tools are online, then it's useless (don't talk about offline webapps here, because they can't access/parse local data IIRC)?
I'm pointing out their weaknesses because it
seems that most people are too focused on their
strengths while ignoring their weaknesses.
That's not necessarily an excuse. People don't deal with total system failure on a daily basis, but that's not an excuse to poo-poo'ing the idea of having a backup plan that is tried and tested.
Also, I'm not saying that people shouldn't use WebApps, but the idea that the industry is going to completely get rid of locally run applications in favor of doing 100% of your work and data storage 'in the cloud' is short-sighted if we are ignoring the weaknesses of such an approach, no?
And I didn't mentioned the temptations associated with massive centralization yet…
Personally, I use my web apps for backup already -- images go on Picasa so I don't have to worry about whether my local drive is going to die or not. (I already have Time Machine configured, but that's mostly for music.)