Peters: The Desktop or the Browser: Is the Netbook Escalating the Battle?

E-Mail is always going to be a special case, but for other applications, I think that a Linux desktop combined with storage in the cloud is excellently well placed to compete. The weak side of web applications is the difficulty of migrating to a different service. However a typical Linux desktop contains the tools for dealing with most interesting types of data out of the box, so if it can painlessly connect to the network storage, the user is just as free to switch to a different physical system and work as they are used too. Of course, if the system is controlled by someone else, this presents a greater privacy risk than "pure" cloud services :)