Comment If it weren't for web-enabled apps... (Score 4, Interesting) 431
I am the sole IT person for a nonprofit, volunteer animal rescue. They don't have any money to pay for professional staff (preferring to spend it on the animals instead).
All of our IT tools (a wiki, a bird tracking database, OTRS, our website, a chat server, etc) are webapps.
The type of people, for the most part, who are willing to volunteer to do animal rescue are not geeks, techies or even "power users". For a long time our animal tracking database was a client application. 75% of the volunteers had so much trouble figuring out how to INSTALL IT and connect it to our database (even with written instructions) that they didn't even use it, and had to ask others to do all their data entry for them.
It got to the point that each adoption coordinator had to be set up with a technically astute "data entry buddy".
Now that our bird database is a webapp, all the coordinators can use it, because they CAN navigate to a website and use the tool.
So, yeah, there's a place for thick client apps too, but without webapps we'd be screwed.