Does anyone think that large organisations will tend to move to Web-browser based business applications over the next few years?
Yes. We're upgrading (slowly but certainly) JDE and it gets rid of all the fat / skinny clients in favor of Web. Which has been the trend in ERP for a few years now.
I don't know if it's a good idea or not - people (coughmanagement*) seem to underestimate the amount of resources ops needs to maintain large farms of web servers in the enterprise.
On the other hand, for a few years I was responsible for a bar-code server, which had it's own client to install and that was a white-line nightmare, let me tell you. I don't miss it at all.
An accountants firm I was working for 7 years ago was moving that way. It started when they had to upgrade their time and fees software to being browser based. It was far from perfect, but it logically made so much sense. Once they thought about it, it seemed the logical way to go for everything, so they set it as a long term goal. Dunno how far they got, I packed in working at that time. (nothing to do with any of that)
My employer thinks that lots of people will switch to using remote `cloud-based' applications. Including web-browser based, but also using custom-clients. But then, they are in the business of selling those remote app software.
Even in small organisations, at least two projects I have now been involved with have been migrating legacy desktop applications to rich HTML/XUL websites. It's definitely where the smart money is in terms of accessibility.
Does anyone think that large organisations will tend to move to Web-browser based business applications over the next few years?
If so, will that make it easier to switch the client device without major change in the central plumbing?