The Disappearing Desktop - It's Real This Time

[Brian Maher]

Dan,

The company I work for tried this model (application service  
provider .. i.e. you rent the software) and it did not work well at  
all.  The simple fact is that people will always want to "own" both  
their data and the app that manipulates it.  Will some people use  
this?  Yes.  Will most use it?  No.

Personally, I see the world eventually moving to more desktop apps  
which use the internet (specifically http/htttps) as a transport  
protocol for data (think desktop app that talks http/htttps to apache  
which in turn invokes the requested cgi/servlet to process the sent  
data and send back a response).

Brian