That "web-apps built around collaboration" played a major role, is clearly wrong, web-apps have plenty of defensive mechanisms that prevent flexible use from wi

That "web-apps built around collaboration" played a major role, is clearly wrong, web-apps have plenty of defensive mechanisms that prevent flexible use from within programs (i.e. bots) or reuse of the output (scraping). The web was simply a working cross-platform and usable over the network environment despite the bad performance, additional hardware (connectivity) requirements and developers found these advantages significant enough to prefer building web-apps over desktop equivalents. Unfortunately, because major websites are still a PITA to use and [would] greatly benefit from native implementations (FB, Twitter, Youtube...).