Nova Spivack, founder and CEO of Twine has an interesting post at RWW. He makes a number of points

The desktop of the future is going to be a hosted web service

The Browser is Going to Swallow Up the Desktop

The focus of the desktop will shift from information to attention

Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders.

The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence

The desktop of the future is going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in

Interactive shared spaces will replace folders

Sorting through a couple of Capt. Obvious points ("The Webtop will be more social" ... you're kidding me?!?!?), he does make a few more interesting points. For example,

The focus of the desktop will shift from information to attention

is a really good point. Sure it's just the latest way to say "drinking from a firehose", yet it at least cleanly articulates what we all deal with daily, at levels that when we step back and think about it are nearly incomprehensible ... with much more to come.

A Bit of Wishful Thinking
Yet from my perspective at least a couple of the points just fall into true blue believer wishful thinking ... as in "But it JUST HAS to happen this way ... doesn't it?"

Ummmm ... no.

Let's pick one to illustrate:

The Browser is Going to Swallow Up the Desktop

That meme has been going around for quite a while. Probably the most famous, recent, and all around hard to escape incarnation of that philosophy is clearly the iphone. So let's take a look there and see what we can learn.

Great browser? Check.

Uber-outstanding display? Check.

Tons of mindshare with a maximum mind-control field targeted at making everyone believe that browser apps constituted everything anyone would ever need? Check.

Fast network? Check.

Ubiquitous? Check. Check. Check.

On the Road to Web-App Total Domination
Well we all know what happened with six months of this strategy ... Google unveiled Android, and Apple had no choice but to open up their platform (ok, not really very open ... but at least non-Apple employees can sort of write apps!).

The marketplace is voting at a furious pace, with more than 60,000,000 apps downloaded in the first month. Yes some folks extrapolate from their own first month experience and say that all of this will die down soon, to be replaced by the browser alone.

Yet I just don't see it.

The reality is that simply physics (bandwidth is NOT the same thing as latency) still dictates local responses for highly interactive tasks. No doubt much of that will (and already is, of course) done in browser apps.

But to contend that everything will move within the browser is just as unsupportable as saying something like "all development will be done in language <insert your favorite language / framework here>".

How many times has that prediction been made, in one form or another?

It's just silly, really.

All the Same
I understand that true blue believers can take exception to everything I've said, except for one thing .... 60,000,000 apps in one month, on the best mobile web browsing platform ever ... with some great tailored web apps (the newest google reader really is awesome).

Rather than arguing for what is effectively both the repeal of the laws of physics and universal world peace at precisely the same moment, perhaps it would be more productive to create more effective clients to use all that cloud-based services have to offer ...

... and build these inside or outside the browser, as best fits the circumstances.

A quick shout-out to Reuven Cohen for noticing this particular post, which I'd overlooked in a category in my RSS reader that had over 755 unread items in it ... today! Relatively ironic, wouldn't you say?