Melding of WebTop Offices with DeskTop Offices?

Nope, not yet at least. I remember hearing about how webapps would take over the world during the dot bomb years, it sounded kinda like commie talk to me (Take my software apps away from me? Never!) but years later I now view it as complementing destop apps, not replacing them. I just finished reading a bit about the AJAXy Office and different ajax/web applications available out there. Google pretty much cleaned house, not surprising but they might have glazed over some other webapps that might have google beat.

Anyway, these AJAX apps are fine, and for collaborative working i agree with the AJAX Office author, desktop apps can't touch the web apps but the superiority stops there. These webapps ( Web Applications) have a ways to go, but to me thats not a problem, i would prefer a streamlined (possibly minimal) program that i could access from anywhere *IF* i could seamlessly use the documents through my desktop app. The examples that come to mind are syncing web calendars with outlook/thunderbird or my PDA/smartphone, or editing my web doc from a webapp or a desktop app without having to download/upload the doc/spreadsheet. I could see Microsoft doing something like this with office and their MS Live site, or niftier yet, Open Office working like this, very nice. oh well, for me, the big thing is a nice calendaring app (think Google Calendar meets 30 Boxes) that would sync with Outlook and my PDA, this would be *veeery* useful for me.