[gwenhwyfaer]

You're absolutely right, in some aspects. Some things will always be better done locally; it's ridiculous to contemplate writing a 3d game without access to a 3d API, for example. And it's silly to have a ton of cheap processing power sat under your desk pretending to be a 3270.

So I wonder if the future is going to be client-server at all? Perhaps the arrangement will be that in exchange for using the services of webapp X, you contribute your processor to act as part of the distributed processing for the backend part of that webapp. Your request might end up being processed on your machine, or it might be processed three thousand miles away whilst your machine is processing someone else's request... If peer-to-peer file transfer applications (or, you know, natural history) have taught us anything, it's the value of distributed, decentralised, cellular systems. The webapps we're seeing right now are incredibly primitive, and have barely scratched the surface of such things - but when they do, when people start talking JSON or AJAX or some other ETLA to each other's browsers rather than to centralised servers, when the only difference between a web browser and a web server is that the browser has the GUI loaded - then we'll really see the value of webapps...

...hmm. Excuse me, I may be a little busy for a while...