If your app is highly data-driven, the default answer for what programming model to use is now "web application", barring special circumstances (e.g., you absol

If your app is highly data-driven, the default answer for what programming model to use is now "web application", barring special circumstances (e.g., you absolutely need to have computationally intense stuff like 3D graphics or machine learning). Common installation packages, the ones that tell you to shut down everything else and make you click next 50 times just to install one little app, suck and could be improved. I don't see how this corresponds to "the desktop is dead". If your badass uber-leet Ajax app takes 20+ seconds to load, uses up 80-140+ MB of RAM, feels slow on a Pentium 4 machine, does less than an Apple IIe app, and could go down at any time leaving you totally helpless (as happened the other day in spite of the high-speed "backup" systems those high-profile Web 2.0 sites allegedly had), you have failed. Deal with it. You can use simple reality checks here. If your clunky "rich text" editing widget thingie is crippled in ways Notepad is not, you have failed. If your spreadsheet app is maddeningly frustrating to use for more than 100 rows or if you know any keyboard shortcuts at all, you have failed. And so forth.