Other than having to update your web browser and plug-ins every week, that provide the installation, maintenance, permissions, and hardware access. Plus log-ins, passwords, pop-ups, JavaScript vulnerabilities, redirects, scary-looking URLs, seams between transitions between pages, ads, ads, ads...

Apps gained traction because they worked better than web apps. That's why people pay for them.

If Google hadn't gone public, it could have been different. I'd rather deal with corporate-style egos (Mozilla) than with hoards of investors who only care about cash returns.

Of course, good luck trying to do things like buy Motorolla Mobile when you're relying solely on angel investors.

In other words, to forcefully expand their market presence to ensure success. What changed is how you define the market of "free" services.

I can get arrested for walking into a business open to the public? Gee, I better not walk into any stores, anywhere... ever.

Unless I want to fake slipping and falling on their waxed floors, and then sue them. :)

Don't you mean laptops?

Netbooks failed because they kept creeping up in price until they became cheap, crappy laptops, complete with the same cheap, crappy bundled software that ran terribly on the lowly hardware. It was a cool idea that was blown out of proportion.

Tablets are hugely expensive for what they offer and have slow "HD's" and tiny amounts of memory. Thanks to software that was written with the hardware in mind, tablets seem to be selling just fine.

While I sympathize with developers who have ambitious ideas, the bottom line is that you have to develop within the limitations of the hardware. If your software is too slow or otherwise suffers in performance, then your software is simply too slow.

Cue stories about how RAM chips were too slow to keep up with cutting-edge video controllers in the 90's.

How much are these periodic payments? Given how much money could be up for grabs, I would think this could quickly get too expensive for individual inventors. Periodic payments and a broken industry are rarely an encouraging combination.

I could feel the effects of such periodic payments when my old bank told me they were charging me a monthly image fee for sending me badly scanned and scaled pictures of each check I wrote. So, they started charging me for digital prints, when previously they mailed me the used checks with my monthly statement for free.

But then you're depriving them the wealth and access to technology that would help lift them out of the stone age. That's why we should never feel guilty about outsourcing.

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What's surprising about this? The Amiga community was notorious for it's hackers, and those guys threw their code into the public domain back when public domain was actually public and the GPL didn't exist.

Granted, mal-ware was more for yuks than profit back then.