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The other important point, hit right up there at the front is: desktop apps aren't going away anytime soon.

It's been a real ride for me coming back into the web world after about 6 years of working on enterprise and desktop apps. Everyone in the web world seems to think we're just on the cusp of everything moving over to the web. Which is pretty much what they were saying when I was working in web programming 7 years ago. To the rest of the universe, desktop apps are still mainstays of day-to-day computing and while there is a shift, it's much more gradual than people in the web business seem to assume.

Amusingly, this phenomenon is not all that different from what folks working in the Linux desktop have been assuming since I got into that some 8 years ago: that this is the year of the Linux desktop. It's about to tip any day now...

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In the case of the linux desktop, I have to say that I think it is a lot closer than 8 years ago. I have tried installing Linux at many points over the last 8 years or so. I have always abandoned it because configuring hardware took too much work. I recently installed Ubuntu 8.04 on 3 different machines, including a brand new Dell laptop, and the install worked flawlessly on each. Most importantly, every piece of hardware I've tried worked with basically no configuration - sound card, internal microphone, wireless, and graphics card. I did install a new driver for the Nvidia graphics card, but this was mostly optional. Also, when I've needed to tweak settings or install the new driver for the video card, I've done it through a GUI rather than the command line and various cryptic config files.

Installing software through Synaptic is also awesome. This is one place where Linux now actually excels over Windows. Of course, I haven't actually needed to install anything that's not in synaptic yet.

You can usually just add repositories to get almost anything into Synaptic.

Compiling on your own does not need more than calling configure and make in most cases, though.

Okay, I agree. That makes three facts everyone knows to go with the three mspaint drawings. I appreciate ted's snark, I just wanted something compelling enough to get riled up in agreement.

Do you get the sense that everyone in the web world knows that desktop apps aren't going anywhere? This seems obvious to me, but I've gotten into a number of arguments with folks on it.

There seems to be a certain fervor and excitement about "web 2.0" that people seem to get carried away in forecasting its implications.

For me this is kind of amusing, since I've been tracking networking stuff through a couple decades of "thin client" fads. "The network is the computer" is hardly a new idea. :-)

Usually when I want to be really productive on my computer, the first thing I do is unplug the DSL router. :-)

> Do you get the sense that everyone in the web world knows that desktop apps aren't going anywhere?

When I worked at a company doing enterprise financial software, I got the distinct impression that it was virtually impossible to sell a new desktop app. Our customers wanted everything to be web-based. I was hired as a desktop app developer and got switched over to web development after 8 months because all our new products were web-based.

I suspect that we'll see something similar to what happened with PCs and mainframes. The PC didn't kill the mainframe - all the old apps that used to run on mainframes still ran on mainframes. However, all new software, the category-killers that created new markets, were all developed on the PC. Mainframes stuck around for years before finally being killed by Y2K and web-based intranet apps, and some are still working.

Similarly, I think any attempt to displace office suites and such on the web is a losing battle. PC-based apps are "good enough" for what they're used for. But virtually all new killer apps, the ones with exciting market opportunities, will be on the web. Or they'll be web/desktop hybrids like DropBox, RescueTime, or BitTorrent, in cases where the app needs some local data that the browser can't provide.

Then PC apps will finally be killed by whatever new thick client ends up replacing the web, but we've got a while (maybe 10-20 years) before that happens.

Agreed. Also, it's finally a way to get customers onto subscription models, which has seemed the holy grail of desktop apps for some time.

Write once, bill forever...

"I said, well daddy dont you know that things go in cycles The way that Bobby Brown is just ampin like Michael" - A Tribe Called Quest

I think that there is indeed a pendulum effect of over-reaction from one mainstream mindset to the other. But one things is for sure, no company in the past was able to predict what the future would bring - if they did they would have switched their ways. I think the sad fact is that these changes in mainstream mindset are very fluid and hard to predict and survival of the fittest company/solution is very much a game of chance.

This might be a reason for the longevity of larger companies like GE that can afford to have many bets on the table.

> Usually when I want to be really productive on my computer, the first thing I do is unplug the DSL router. :-)

Is that literally true? (I've done it - but not for a while... maybe I should start doing it again)

The important part: yes. I do disconnect the internet completely. The figurative part: no, I do it by turning off the internet routing, not by actually removing the cable from the wall.

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