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...
Are you talking about the average Denny's customer? <ba bing!>
Are you going to put up servers so that I can solve large-scale quadratic programming and machine vision problems? Are you going to ask me to run a non-linear optimization routine written in JavaScript?!
You expect me to accept circa-1994 graphics in games? You expect me to pay for that?
What kind of dreamworld are you living in?
Google Spreadsheets hemmorages, huffs and puffs if you have more than several dozen rows - it robs power users of most of their keyboard shortcuts and has no kind of extensibility at all. It uses up dozens of MB of RAM with a blank sheet. It's a real Excel killer alright. Which is amazing because Excel has only seen minor, incremental improvements in the last decade.
You're telling me quasi-3D games I played in 1994 on a machine 300x slower than the one I'm using right now constitutes approaching parity with local native code?
In several years, a language like JavaScript will run on the machines available then the way C++ runs on today's machines. But when that happens, machines with many cores will be ubiquitous, and the ridiculous lag will still be present - would you like to run your embarassingly parallel program with 1 core or 32? (1 of course, it's online! Wowzers!)