"Some conference that wants to sell me stuff" has a webcasted talk by David Temkin, Founder and CTO of the Laszlo corporation. For a majority of the time, he talks about why they chose to develop the Laszlo Webtop. It is a philosophy, and like all great arguments in computing, it comes down to philosophy, not technology.

I found said webcast after reading about it on Antun’s Blog, and he found me after my "really positive post" last week.

All this webtop vs. desktop is actually really interesting. I think some remarkable points from David's talk are:

1. Desktop makes it really hard to share data between more than one machine. I would add especially if they're not on the same LAN/WAN.
2. The fundamental GUI for desktops hasn't changed at all in 20 years. This point is so much a part of the fabric of the desktop experience that it will take years to turn over.
3. Downloadable and local apps with web enablement are something cool, but phishers and virus makers have forced us to be untrusting of anything we have to download. Even Apollo has warnings for installing 3rd party apps.
4. There are still certain apps we need a full-fledged desktop for, like CD/DVD playing, ripping, burning. If we gave that functionality to the browser (with proper permisssion, of course), desktop apps could be replaced by web apps.
5. Some enterprises are installing full-fledged versions of their intranet/portal/CRM on every employees laptop so they always have a full working copy of the app. This happens because business logic is not currently transportable in downloadable apps. Yes, not even with Apollo.

I guess I just summarized the whole thing for you, and you don't really need to watch it any longer, but he says a lot more that I felt like I knew, and maybe you guys don't know. Check out Antun’s Blog for info about how to access the webcast (you need to give them your name/email), then watch and learn.