I guess zaine's post makes me want to underline why i surely hope that i am right and the people who believe the browser and thin client will take over are wrong.
For me, the idea of being dependent on a corporation to host my files and my applications is something i find very unappealing. I do not want to move to web-based applications run on some corporation's server. I'm not a huge fan of google, and i don't like this trend to hosted and ad-supported webware.
I'm looking forward to the day where we all own our own software again, but where it is as ubiquitous, cross-platform and web-enabled as current web services are, and looking forward to an end to the ad-supported web services.
One of the tricks people always accused Microsoft of employing but which is a more widespread than microsoft is called "embrace and extend (and extinguish)":
"Embrace, extend and extinguish,"[1] also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate,"[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice alleged[3] was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe their strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors."The trick is to lock users into using a specific product and make it hard to move away. Well the web services have figured out this game as well, and the fact that all your data is already on their servers and not transparently available to you (for the most part) makes it even easier. I simply do not want to be dependent on corporations to hold all my data online. It's not that i have paranoid thoughts that they are doing bad stuff with my data, it's that i want control of my stuff. I don't want to be dependent on some corporation's marketing strategy to decide how i can access it and whether they want to let me move my data to some other competitor's service.
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