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What this article really predicated is GUI apps delivered via a web interface, which we definitely have in spades. Web components and tools like Electron have a

What this article really predicated is GUI apps delivered via a web interface, which we definitely have in spades. Web components and tools like Electron have allowed "GUI" apps to become inseparable from web apps. Photoshop now runs in a browser, which would have been considered impossible at the time of the article and was, in fact, impossible until fairly recently. The terminology didn't stick, but the idea certainly did. I think it's safe to say that more people run software delivered by a browser, over the web, than run desktop applications today. And even those who use desktop apps do a very significant portion of their work with browser-based apps.

creshal 3y ago
The article explicitly called for native networked apps (Java-based, or activex based, e.g.) to bury the browser, because browsers can't be offline-first and can't be dynamic enough. In the end, the opposite happened: After a brief profusion of native network UIs experimenting with new kinds of dynamism, browsers just absorbed their features until all other network UIs were dead.
- rapnie 3y ago
  And hopefully now we keep going on the (still slow) uptake on the local-first software [0] paradigm. [0] https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/
  - creshal 3y ago
    Killing flash, activex and java applets was definitely worth prioritizing.
wavemode 3y ago
> Photoshop now runs in a browser, which would have been considered impossible at the time of the article and was, in fact, impossible until fairly recently. It was possible in the age of applets. But applets were just the wrong technology at the wrong time.