> Hope folks will always keep that in mind as they develop software for proprietary platforms they don't own.

You're right of course and "The Other Road Ahead" was very prescient, but I think the desktop vs web-app divide is marginal nowadays, excepting one huge difference: desktop apps can offer a guarantee of privacy which browser based apps cannot.

Note that a guarantee is just that, Apple offer privacy guarantees, but there is is of course no such thing as absolute privacy or security.

It's perfectly possible to write desktop apps that are thin clients for web apps, so there's no real divide except where the code executes: in the browser sandbox, or in the OS sandbox.

The current issue with desktop apps is mainly UI framework related. The browser based programming model has had so many resources thrown at it that somehow JavaScript and a bunch of divs is probably the best UI framework there is, and it pains me to say that.