The IM client is similarly a personal, real-time message router sitting on the smart edge of the network, the end device. It is push and pull, publish and subscribe. For it to reach its full potential, it needs native, rather than sandboxed, access to OS resources in the same manner as the browser needs to be a desktop or native application. IM is more than a chat application which delivers messages for human consumption.

(We could have a different argument where we could merge the native IM client code base into the browser code itself giving the simulated real-time experience provided by AJAX hacks a run for their money- ping us if interested )

–pushpendra
Pushpendra Mohta
http://www.vayusphere.com

Responsible parents have locked down their PC’s, so the only alternative is to run web hosted apps.

The entire genre of applications that are heavy and complex are still very much desktop apps. All Mechanical and Electronic design is done on the desktop, for example. I believe, Architectural design as well. Same with Industrial Design.

Sramana

“nothing stands in the way of the web monster that is gobbling up desktop applications, chewing them up and spitting them out as a web applications”

Nothing, except bandwidth. Seriously, I must live in the wrong part of town, because last I checked, I don’t have an always-on, fast (and I mean FAST) broadband connection, which is a presupposition for the theory that desktop applications are dead.

Great user experiences shouldn’t have caveats, whether that caveat is the speed or availability of your bandwidth. This is why I am a firm believer in marrying the advantages that a native client app with local storage has (rich, faster than broadband experience, flexible UI, offline capability) seamlessly with the advantages of a thin-client experience (remote backup, collaboration, etc). The combined whole is bigger and better than simply the sum of the individual parts.

Let’s take Outlook and OWA (Outlook Web Access) in the corporate email world — exact same application experience delivered thru a browser and a rich client. How many people go into work and login to their OWA account thru Firefox when they have the option of using Outlook desktop client instead?

A hybrid user experience, which provides the best of both worlds to people, bridged seamlessly by an sync server like MS Exchange makes sense to me, which is our vision for the Sharpcast platform. For those that are curious, check out Sharpcast Photos 1.0 and you’ll see what I am talking about.

I scribbled down a few more thoughts about this in a blog entry I wrote a few months ago:

http://www.sharpcast.com/blog/2006/11/07/the-answer-is-often-in-the-middle/

Granted I have a biased and strong viewpoint on this, but this really isn’t a fair argument until Om uses only Firefox and his IM client on his Mac.

Cheers,

Gibu Thomas
CEO, Sharpcast

Don’t get me wrong, I love and use online apps myself, they have their place, but imagine showing up at a sales presentation in a customer office knowing that your financial spreadsheet on the project you are presenting is safely stored on a server on the Internet–but your customer has a properly locked-down LAN with no access for outsiders and you cannot reach the spreadsheet to prove the ROI of the project. Does that mean you reach for a handy print-out and a magnifying lens to peruse the columns of figures? Not a good or forward-appearing solution. Oh, and we did not mention how the presentation materials were presented without a desktop app (think Powerpoint) because there was no access to some future available online presentation program.

Online apps are great for folks who always have a nearby online connection, whether in their own office or physical social area. But, as evidenced above, there are hundreds of thousands of people a day doing business without access to the online world, and that’s why desktop apps will survive until the day there is a constantly-on, online presence everywhere.

Some observers here have the correct idea, online apps need to have some presence and ability on the desktop, or quite possibly the relationship needs to start the other way around. Sorry if this seems like a rant, but people are forgetting the obvious and jumping a long ways into a future that may never happen for a number of reasons.