No. Just no. Anyone, anywhere, with minimal understanding of JS and HTML can pop out a web app mashup today that would have required a hoard of cash, servers, and developers a decade ago to build. Further, for pennies a month they can run and scale it on a 'cloud' service that would have been an investment of millions in the past.
The web and web apps are very open. Don't conflate it with copyright trolls and mobile walled gardens. Remember, much of HTML5 started from Konqueror, an OSS browser not belonging to a 'cabal of powerful organisations.'
I can't use a kinect with web apps without browser extensions because there is no 'open web standard' for the kinect (and probably never will be) and web apps can't talk to USB devices. The web locks developers into the limited set of functionality that the standards provide and the standards are tightly controlled by a small group of companies. On a real open platform anybody is free to create software that interacts with hardware (ideally with the users permission first) so you don't have to rely on the platform maintainers to bless support for certain things.
I'm glad you mentioned cloud services. From the users point of view they are the most locked down type of software of all. Your data is locked away from you. You can't even reverse a proprietary file format. They are usually closed source (and even if the source is available, you can't change the version that you actually use). You can't even reverse engineer a binary.
Native software was scaling up to millions of users before any marketing hack even came up with the term 'cloud'. You are confusing running a web app a decade ago with distributing software a decade ago. You certainly did not need hoards of cash and servers to distribute native software a decade ago. People 20 years ago were writing native software and distributing it to hundreds of thousands of people, and I can assure you the typical shareware author was not investing millions to do that.
>The web and web apps are very open.
Open until you wan't to do something that isn't allowed by the standards, and then you (and your users) are screwed. On HN we get a lot of submissions about people 'hacking' with web technologies, but nearly all of them are just making use of some new API that has been gifted to them by the browser creating overlords. Which is all well and good and there is nothing wrong with that, but it's not a substitute for hacking on the platform itself and doing things that the creators perhaps didn't want you to do.
The real test for an open platform: can it be self hosting? Can I write a web browser as a web app? Not without shunting all the real work to a separate machine that is not limited by the web sandbox.
[1] which also applies to nearly all of the evil native platforms that the web is supposedly freeing us from
Funny you should say that, because I have actually done this. You can get a driver for the kinect that makes the depth camera appear as a normal webcam, and the media api in the browser allows you to access the kinect depth webcam.
It took a second reading to realize that this comment was not intended to be humorous -- which makes it even more entertaining.
Also, in reply to your subsequent post, there are web browsers written in javascript, so your self-hosting capabilities are realized, as well as all your browser-Inception needs.
Really? Where?