Ask: Why do web developers think the only applications people use are web apps?

I dont think the only apps people use are web apps. I just think that the majority of apps are moving to the web(basically, like you said, data driven applications), like CRM applications, Payroll applications, everything enterprise due to 'SOA's(Service Oriented Architectures), and more.

The web doesn't require a download, or an install like emule, kazaa, or bearshare. Web based applications also have less of a chance(if any) of infecting your computer with a virus like file sharing programs.

Gaming(imo) will always be native to the machine, only utilizing a connection for competing against other players.

So, it really doesn't become insignificant, it just takes more a back seat to applications that allow for more human interaction(any social network), profit(crm apps, soa's) or fame(myspace, youtube).

Because stuff you can "only do locally" may not have that restriction in the near future.

The web is a classic disruptive innovation. It's significantly worse in most measures of performance (speed, ease of programming, consistency) than existing technologies. But it's better in a significant way (ease of deployment), and it lets you do things that old technologies did not (all the social-community stuff). Over time, the performance of both the incumbent technologies and the new disruptive technology increase. However, customers don't need the added performance along the traditional dimensions. When you're already at 30 FPS and photo-realistic images, how much better can you get?

When the web first came out, it wasn't good for much besides documents, and any sort of data-driven form application was very difficult to manage. Now practically everything online has some sort of interactivity. Then people said it would never be able to do office apps - and now we've got Google Docs & Spreadsheets & Presently. Now you're saying it'll never do high-performance 3D games - but somebody has already cloned Doom in Javascript (http://canvex.lazyilluminati.com/83/play.xhtml). Over time, you'll see webapps take over more and more markets from the desktop, until there's nothing left.

(And then the disruptive technology will shift to something else, like cell-phones or neuro-implants or whatever.)

Every point of friction the user encounters when trying to use a product is point where they will stop and do something else. Desktop software is too difficult to try out. People are scared of spyware. Configuration and system compatibility can be a huge hassle. Under Vista, there are a zillion security warnings to click through. And in business environments, computers are often locked down. Forcing users to go through that just to try your product will turn off the majority of your site visitors, resulting in much lower sales.

Another key factor is that with web based software you can do continuous releases, which is key in a competitive environment.

The only things that should be written as desktop software are applications that absolutely cannot be done in a desktop environment ( like games and P2P file sharing). But even then, doing it in Flash is better than requiring an actual download.

I think the reason is simply that desktop software is in many ways already a mature field, with few earth shattering developments in the last decade or so, while web apps are a more recent phenomenon, and hence more 'exciting'.

Most of the recently hyped webapps, like MySpace and Facebook, are really apps that currently make no sense as desktop software. Their entire raison d'etre is to provide lightweight communication between huge masses of people. As people start demanding more from them, I expect them to start adding desktop offshoots in order to support more sophisticated behaviors and interactions.

So all those devs out there are using web apps to create the 'web apps'. Sorry, but i don't use a broswer-based text editor to create shit.

I don't really like the way you worded the question, but I think the number one reason is because it gives you ease of portability between places and that what people like.

Do you use del.icio.us? I do, because I can save stuff to it then when I go by a friends house and want to show them something, i go to my account and click it. I don't have to remember it or google for it, but I also use the regular bookmarks on my browser.

I do get your question and have to agree with this on one thing photoshop for web.

Gaming isn't making all those Billions off of PC users, it's dedicated game consoles that make all the money. The reason console gaming is growing so much compared to PC gaming is because of ease of use, which is the main reason web apps are so popular.

PC gaming is broken precisely because of the problems with writing software for the millions of PCs out there. Web development, on the other hand, is like building a game for a console, you don't have to worry about all the hardware that's out there, you just write to the environment. While writing web apps is not like having a unified development environment it's a lot closer than trying to write a program that will run on every hardware configuration out in PC land, and Mac, and Linux, and Solaris, etc.

Just as console gaming is slowly killing the PC gaming industry web applications will slowly kill classic PC applications. That doesn't mean that the PC is going away, but the future definitely lives on the web.

I hear all the 'web dev taking over the world' arguments, but no one has addressed the major issue - latency.

Anyways, I don't think the future will be 100% web app or 100% client app. Probably a mix of both (ie, imagine a 3d renderer running locally, but having smooth access to millions of geometrical models stored on the web).