Reports of the death of the desk-top application have, apparently, been greatly exaggerated.

The point behind Web Office isn’t to kill all desk top applications. Instead, the point is to add some new ones. For years, knowledge workers have been limited to about 6 applications. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and a Web Browser. That’s all you got. Those were your tools. Now get work….. Of course the result was a lot of six-figure MBAs who spent half their time cutting and pasting or asking who had the latest version.

Web Office is about adding to that list of 6 productivity tools. Start with Blogs and Wikis. Add social networking tools.

Some of these new tools are forcing us to reconsider the use of old tools such as Word. Richard MacManus points to a great recent post about Google and Writely by Phil Sim in which Phil says:

As an aside, I think wordprocessors as we use them are pretty much a redundant application anyway. Most of what we write should logically now be done inside your email application or your blogging/publishing tool. It’s only complex document designed for print that really need to be created in something like Word and in this instance a low-end desktop publishing tool like Publisher might even make more sense anyway. I don’t think it will be long before Word and Publisher come together

Phil’s right. That’s why I used Apple’s amazing Pages to write the Web Office white-paper.

But Phil’s post also brings out another important point. Just because it makes sense to add to the original list of six productivity tools does not mean it makes sense to try and kill off every desk-top application there is.

Why should a browser be the only local app we use to interact with Web based information? Video games are a great example of a whole class of local apps that work with and through the Internet. And there is good reason why most video games will not be run through Flash and AJAX. Cool as Flash and AJAX are, they are both lousy for pushing polygons.