It makes total sense; OTOH I'm kind of cracking up here because isn't this what a web browser has become? A portal for viewing a remote application state, that

It makes total sense; OTOH I'm kind of cracking up here because isn't this what a web browser has become? A portal for viewing a remote application state, that can be serialized into a blob of semi-structured XML and JSON? It's hard to imagine that retrofitting such a serialization onto the total wild west that is desktop applications could be any more successful or consistent than what the web has already got.