If you think Net applications are faster, you again, are mistaken. Not to mention the amount of resources it takes your machine (which is not a screamer by your own words) to render an AJAX page. If you want to run layers on top of layers just because you think the bottom layer dont cut it anymore, thats a weird logic. Absolutely no reason for Web apps to not become as bloated as our desktop software has become, and instead of trying to change the paradigm, try to advocate change in desktop software instead, because the resources on the bottom layer are just more vast. A CPU executing a native process is potentially 100x faster if not by thousands, than that same CPU executing AJAX code. And the gap will never really close. If you dont care about speed, you should at least care about your power bill. If the whole computer user planet switches to webapps, the resource usage of every machine goes up and makes a not so small contribution to our already prevalent (thanks to idiots similiar to those sitting in board rooms in Silicon Valley) energy crisis.

You are right in your dissatisfaction, but you propose the wrong solution. I, for one, do not want to live in a web browser during my user session.

Find and install people who write real software instead.

Thank you for reading, I apologise for emotions. After all, i am only human.

Cheers,
Daniel

Also, the problem isn’t with applications installed on the desktop – the problem is with what applications you’re running. avast! is lower footprint than Norton, Thunderbird is lower footprint than Outlook (right?), Opera is lower footprint than IE or Firefox 2.* (and I hear good things about Firefox 3), and of course OS X and Ubuntu both are much lower footprint than Vista. You don’t need a screamer to run office on an XP desktop with a virus scanner running in the background – hell, I did it on a 700MHz CPU, 256MB RAM computer for 2 years. Say what you want about performance, but at least concede that having the full application in RAM is not the only problem here.

There is something quite nice about taking my laptop, files and all, on flights with me (to name one example). Don’t tell me that VLC, Mathematica, or iTunes (all of which I use on flights regularly) should be Saas.

Seriously consider finding alternative software.

At the time, it simply didn’t work. Broadband wasn’t reliable enough.

Now, in 2008, I’m pushing for my company to move to an online database system. I believe uptimes have improved enough that it will work, and I believe that the improvements in the company gained by the ability to communicate between sites will more than compensate for the odd few minutes of downtime that still occur (usually because of our crappy router, but I know how to kick that back into life).

And my boss won’t believe me Doesn’t think it will be reliable enough.