So you think desktop apps will die a slow death? The sentiment of demise of desktop apps has been professed by many people, Jeff Atwood, Patrick McKenzie to name a few. With colossal jump in our web technologies, both performance and capability wise, something that couldn’t have been possible few years back, the idea is getting even more traction. When you see demos like this, you are tempted to think if web browsers would be able to address the performance issue, what would withhold for web to be used for everything from games to essential business software?
So why do I think desktop apps still make sense?
- Passiveness of income: While it may be true, web apps fare great when it comes to potential revenue, cross-platform comparability, and reach, it is indispensable to avoid working actively on it. Have you ever heard of someone who was pulling off revenue his age old SaSS app without putting in any work? On the other side, I still get sales from one of my stupid script that I made a long time ago and never even marketed. May be a generalized scenario; it might be possible someone earns a passive income from his web app without adding anything but it is hard to think that the developer can avoid tasks like marketing, server monitoring, dealing with quirky consumer issues, or scaling.