People tend to forget history. In 1999 Microsoft created the XMLHttpRequest object in Internet Explorer 5 and used it for the Outlook Web Access supplied with the Microsoft Exchange Server 2000.
That was the first e-mail application taking advantage of Ajax.

I wish the article went into some more fundamental limits, i.e. we know that network latency limits mean that loops which have to run more than a few times a second will never be possible to implement in a client-server fashion. Therefore certain highly interactive features (say dragging and dropping) have to occur in the client, whether that be javascript or C++.

In other words maybe its not about which applications will become web apps, but about which layers and aspects of apps will occur on clients and which on servers.

Yeah, it’s a crying shame no one came up with a system whereby we could casually inject Ajax into traditional web applications without negatively affecting browsers that don’t support it. We could call it “degradable Ajax” and could write entire books about it.

Good job I didn’t know about this when I used Gmail in Lynx a couple of years ago; I wouldn’t have bothered. Oddly enough it seemed to work fine. It’s almost as though Michael didn’t finish his research. I was disappointed it didn’t support Google Maps, though.