Seen in a comment: "Web apps have their place, desktop apps have their place. Are you going to build Photoshop on the web? Hell no."

Photoshop is totally going to become a web app. Give it time.

The essay of that comment, "Web applications suck and they’re not worth creating" is a very well written piece on not understanding what end users want. The fundamental point - that doing what would be a college project on desktop takes much smarter and far longer in the browser - is well made. But it's too late, the users have spoken and they want apps built on arguably one of the worst application platforms in computing history - the browser.  I was talking to a colleague in work about this the other day - possibly as a segue to the "grails v django v rails indecision conversation"; that or the "crap, which ajax framework will we use - let's get it down to 3 for now" one - I'm not sure. What I said was that no engineer in their right mind would actually choose a web browser as the application platform for a planet. The DOM? XHR? Are you kidding? No, the users chose it. Even on phones, webapps are inevitable, converging for the time being on webkit.