Desktop business apps maybe looked better - at least those few that were not designed by the same engineers writing the code - but they all were a lot harder to deploy and maintain. You'd be happy that someone finally bought your app, only to discover that each department in the company has a different version of OS/hardware, with different network & security rules, and people installing all kinds of private stuff on their machines and messing w/ settings. A nightmare. It would take days for us to deploy new version, only to find out that half of the printers stopped printing for some unknown reason. Great, let's waste another week debugging that, while clients are screaming at us for not being able to do their work.
When I fully switched into the web dev world around Y2K, it felt so liberating. Never regretted it for the second...