[cstreit]

I think you'll see a hybrid.

We use a lot of node based, or "grid" computing in the software company I work for. Cool part is, each node is "self aware" and if it goes down, the other nodes pick up the work that the failed node was doing and soldier on. That is one thing that web based J2EE or .not apps suck at... Sure they have good transactional recovery but for long running algorithmic or mathematical processes it sucks.

Enter in the backswing. Back in the early to mid 90's everyone was touting their web interfaces for enterprise architectures. If you didn't have it, or at least were demoing it, you were dead. SO everyone went out and rearchitected. Then the industry realized a few things:

1. Fault tolerance for non-transactional architectures was nearly impossible (which is why we perfected the J2EE grid architecture (proprietary)
2. Web interfaces often took 5-6 clicks for somethinga fat client could do with one drag and drop.

So... Microsoft WMF and some other standards providing a "rich" client (not ugly java ones) with mashups to public apps are starting to see popularity. We've built thick clients for nearly all of our core apps. THese WILL require computing power at the desktop. It just becomes an extension of the overall system.

I also own a small software company and we push some work to the client that ultimately just doesn't require back-communication with the servers, saves us CPU power and cost!