The benefit is to their paymasters, as they get to extract rent (either directly or via ads) without having to contend with software pirates because the actual software logic is sitting pretty in a server cluster somewhere.

Effectively we are back to the world of time-share terminals.

Ironically, we may yet see a renaissance in native code as more investors realize that the US broadband situation (especially wireless) is not getting better anytime soon. This leads to the realization that always-on, high-speed, low-latency broadband is not a safe assumption. Disconnected operation will become more important as the product space for always-on solutions becomes ever-more crowded.

This realization that always-connected apps might be joined by disconnected apps is emphasized when looking to markets across the world. There are more disconnected people in the world than always-on, high-speed, low-latency connected. There is a burgeoning middle class characterized by sporadic, low-speed, high-latency connections, who are willing to spend some money online, for those times they make it online. They might spend pennies each today, but whoever captures those markets is addressing billions of underserved online customers. I'd take a billion $0.01 payments a day any day.

And they get to use open source libraries without having to share any single piece of their changes.