You make some good points. On this, though: Andrew Chen recently blogged on this same topic ...I just read it. He gives tables of numbers and equations that a

You make some good points. On this, though: Andrew Chen recently blogged on this same topic ...I just read it. He gives tables of numbers and equations that as far as I can tell are completely made up. He also recommends practices that I think are pernicious, including: Install itself on the system tray Start up automatically when the OS loads Run nicely in the background to pop up when appropriate ...and many other retention-happy features ("Happy" for whom? Certainly not the poor naive users I know whose computers are bogged down with programs that do these things.) His post is intellectually dodgy in exactly the way that a lot of this kind of software is dodgy. Which makes me notice something I never thought of before: web apps feel cleaner. As a user, I control when I go to the website and use the product; there is less opportunity for semi-scrupulous vendors to mess with me.