You're joking, right?
Mobile is growing hand-over-fist and web apps developers are still arguing about whether they're fast enough to compete, and whether we could possibly maybe actually move past HTML/CSS/JS sometime in this decade.
It's ridiculous, and you claim it's "reality". Fine, your reality sucks, and there's no inherent reason why it has to win ... and it might not.
Mobile has gone from a side-show farmed out to consulting organizations to a mainstream in-house development effort, and the organizations themselves have shifted management and priorities accordingly.
It used to be that almost everyone had a web engineering organization in-house, even non-technology companies. That is changing. Companies like the NYTimes have gone from being grossly unable to manage mobile efforts and farming their work out to subpar contractors, to straight-up building a top-quality team of mobile developers.
Here's the tricky thing about that, too. Those developers, by the nature of where they work in the technology stack, are already quite versatile, and can choose technology solutions outside of the web stack. The problem that most organizations faced originally was that their web departments were a mono-culture and couldn't adapt.
So now you have companies that can and are building technology outside the web, and that means that the network effects that existed before are being torn down. The web tried to leap onto the application bandwagon, and the web failed. Now other technologies are taking over that space.
Who are these development organizations who truly enjoy maintaining five different apps for all the major desktop and mobile platforms and who are aren't going to make the jump as soon as HTML5 delivers everything they need?
Obviously there will always be applications (antivirus, encryption, etc.) for which a browser is poorly suited. But this percentage will never be bigger than it is today.
When will that be, exactly? The promise has been a long time coming, and in the meantime, the constitution of the industry is shifting away from a web myopia.
Next Thursday, 7:39 PM PDT time. Go outside and look at the sky.
> The promise has been a long time coming,
Indeed.
> and in the meantime, the constitution of the industry is shifting away from a web myopia.
I'm sure there are individual companies that fit that description, but I don't see it from where I sit. Here's an example of one of the classic big native platform apps doing stuff on the web. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/