The critical characteristic of the desktop here isn't its use of native code. It's more the local filesystem. Many mobile apps use network data. From this perspective they have more in common with web apps than with desktop software.
Despite this, I'm inclined to agree that the web is threatened. The desktop may be defined by local files but the web wasn't defined by remote ones. It was more about the culture. More about anyone-can-publish. To me, that's the baby at risk in the mobile bathwater.
That, and any aspect of personal computing that can't be performed on a phone. Which is most of them. I'll stick with the hemorrhoids and circadian disruption, thanks.
My wife and I were talking about this the other night: It's not that people who learned to compute on the desktop are abandoning it for mobile. It's that most people couldn't handle desktop computing in the first place. It's too abstract (dare I say difficult?). So the mobile revolution is really about the unwashed masses computing for the first time. Perhaps that's why mobile apps and operating systems eerily remind me of soap operas and reality TV.
> It's not that people who learned to compute on the desktop are abandoning it for mobile. It's that most people couldn't handle desktop computing in the first place.
Totally agree. For most everyday scenarios, using Windows is like flying a Boeing 737 for your daily commute: it's a huge overkill, requiring way too much setting up and maintenance and when you incidentally touches one switch the whole thing stops working.
Windows 8 didn't take off because what MSFT did was in addition to all the panels of the 737, they put an iPad in the cabin. For those familiar with Windows that's no big deal: this is why we see people shrug off all the Win 8 hate, saying "it's just Windows 7 plus touching interface". But for those had trouble coping with Windows in the first place, it's now doubly confusing.
I dig this analogy. Since moving my folks over to iPads, I get emails from them daily, photos shared with me and zero distressed support calls.