We're still trying to find the balance of local and cloud. Desktop apps were great in the 90s because they leverage the local machine's speed and hardware (the

We're still trying to find the balance of local and cloud. Desktop apps were great in the 90s because they leverage the local machine's speed and hardware (there weren't any mp3 or jukebox webapps in the 90s, games etc). But as the browser and web got more powerful and we started moving around more and having more computers (work, laptop, home) the centrality of "the cloud" because a selling point and for many applications the "local power" of the desktop was less important. Now however we're seeing new constraints play a role. On mobile, again power in some cases is a bit limited, we have more data/sensors to play with and HTML hasn't caught up to complicated swipe interfaces too well yet. We have location and accelerometer sensors that haven't been too well integrated yet. And your phone is always with you. So we're seeing a swing to cloud data back local apps again. The 3 mobile apps I use the most are google reader (the new site layout is space wasteful in a browser on my netbook, good luck having fun reading on a mobile browser), a movie player and a music player. On my desktop I'm just as likely to use grooveshark or some other streaming service, but with still expensive mobile bandwidth having "locally cached" mp3s wins out over streaming. If we want to move this back all onto the web, we need an html6 that supports swipe, mobile app like layout, local storage (I know, html5 draft kinda has this... ish) It's all about device constraints and what is available. This is just a signal we need to develop the browser some more if we again want it to be the platform of choice in this new space.