Back in January I opined that  moving to web applications was not the optimal solution to the real problem we have/had with desktop applications which was  installation woes. What we got was a poor UI without installation problems so we (software industry) started to resolve problems like we had when we moved from  terminals to graphical UIs etc. - 
So now we have Rich Internet Applications (RIA) - using technologies like AJAX - but they suffer from other problems  which again we've already been through

Well that was the topic of the post in January. Now I've stumbled upon an interesting/amusing  twist - called Adobe Apollo
Apollo let's you, yes you've guessed it, take your RIA applications and deploy them as desktop applications.  you can now take your HTML, CSSs , AJAX scripts pack them up as a single file (AIR) and lo and behold deploy them on the desktop. You even get these nifty start menu and desktop shortcuts :)

The reason not to dismiss this a complete waste of time - is that what we actually see here is another example of a trend to convergence  web and desktop UI architectures  and programming models. I say "another" because coming from the desktop direction Microsoft is doing pretty much the same thing. WPF brings the web-programming model  with its markup (XAML) and "code-behind" concepts to the desktop as well as pushing the same model to the browser with WPF/E .

The difference between Microsoft's and Adobe's solutions is that, Adobe is coming from the web-side and, as I said, Microsoft is coming from the Desktop side - both companies are striding toward the same goal -  and what we are left with,  is yet another technology war