From: http://log.ometer.com/2007-04.html#3
It boils down to central online storage for all your data, and programs on your client to interact with the data. Which is, in some form or another, the way things will eventually be. I think the key thing is less about building the PC applications, and more about who stores the data and how they do it. Even though Gnome vs KDE gives me little hope for humanity, building menus isn't really a big deal. They're just a tiny window into a big world which, in this guy's case, uses his (or Red Hat's?) Mugshot.org web app. As a side note, ideally every programmed solution would have an open and standard API so that every component along the chain of users and providers could interact well. In that utopia we'd be able to worry about how we use services (back to Gnome vs KDE), rather than how different services interact (do my Ubuntu and Windows desktops access my Facebook friend emails the same way, and do they both share the same list of most frequently used applications, and do those applications include web and client apps, and how does my handheld device access all this, and is it safe to store my documents on service X when service Y can't access it, and...). Since only half the population gets along with themselves at any given time, it takes some special magic to get good standards set and used. So the usual solution to the above problem is dictatorship, which presents its own problem in the form of inter-dictatorship-operability. This message posted from opensolaris.org
