Throw away your desktop apps… Not yet, please

Hmm, webmonkey promises “Fluid and Gears Closes in on Web App Freedom” and saying that soon Gears (local persistence allowing you to use a WebApp offline safely) and Fluid (a way of encapsulating a WebApp as if it was a local app) will mean “you can throw away Word and just use Google Docs”. Great. I did throw away Word and Excel, but not for Google Docs (useful though they are) - I threw them away for the superior user experience of (Apple’s) Pages & Numbers. Fantastic - I can actually enjoy creating good looking informative documents. If we keep the bar as low as “removing Microsoft Word” no wonder web apps are about to replace destop apps…