>I feel the true 'reboot' and memory loss happened with native mobile apps. How did we ever think this would be a good idea?
Native apps weren't a good idea for innovative reasons or to push boundaries of what's achievable, they were a good idea for business reasons: vendor and platform lock in.
And yet web apps don't seem to solve vendor lockin either; see Facebook, Twitter and most recently (and poignantly) Google Reader. And before you mention that people were able to move from Google Reader to something else, you might want to consider it was because it was based on an open protocol (RSS) that wasn't tied to either native or web.
