As others have noted, this article does some fear mongering. But it does raise some issues: 1) WPF might potentially go away. I'm glad I didn't waste any time

As others have noted, this article does some fear mongering. But it does raise some issues: 1) WPF might potentially go away. I'm glad I didn't waste any time learning this so I can care less. People who bought into "WPF is the future" might be unhappy but learned a valuable lesson. I myself learned this lesson with the "Compact Framework is the future" hype. I learned to be skeptical of proprietary stacks from then on. 2) As other posters have mentioned, a lot of apps have front and backends. For shops that use MSFT tech, .net isn't going away from the backend by any means. 3) HTML 5 + JS do let you build apps that are a lot closer to the Desktop experience than previously. If you haven't already, check out these slides (link:http://slides.html5rocks.com/#landing-slide http://slides.html5rocks.com/#landing-slide) and be prepared to be blown away. In fact, Google's Chrome initiative is betting that you can write most application front-ends in the browser now. If MSFT starts supporting these apps in a nice way, this might certainly make HTML5+JS the preferred way of building application front ends (I guess WinForm developers would be ticked off at this). 4) The Windows 8 HTML apps reminded me of the Vista sidebar widget in some ways. Wasn't there going to be a whole market place of apps? There was a lot of hype but it never happened. Thankfully, I had learned my lesson by the time I encountered the "sidebar gadget apps are the future" hype.