Google recently acquired QuickOffice too. So now Google owns native clients for GMail and Docs. In addition, they're continuing to build native apps for GDrive, Google Plus, and probably others.
This is similar to GitHub and Twitter. Both grew out of the web, but have increasingly acquired or built desktop clients, not to mention mobile ones. And Facebook has made an about-turn on HTML5 everywhere and focusing heavily on native mobile apps.
So I see a trend is that cloud-based services are realising they can't just rely on a website. It would be great to see the web catch up, or even close the gap, but right now, native is offering so much more capability, that both web and native apps are necessary for prominent cloud services. That's good for users, they get the best of both worlds, but also going to be a big challenge for resource-limited startups.
There's always the possibility that these app acquisitions are not to strengthen gmail and docs, but to strengthen Android. Google has just bought the maker of the best email client on iPhone, and announced that they're stopping development of it. To me, that sounds more like a direct attack on the iPhone than a vote of confidence for native apps.
This is one thing that I've thought about Web 2.0 (now that it is in full swing). Countless dollars seem to be going to trying to reinvent the desktop inside the browser, when really the internet should supplement it as an expansion to its capabilities. Dropbox is the best example of this: there is a web client, but Dropbox truly shines as a simple folder that is the same across your devices. It takes the folder system and improves on it, rather than doing away with it altogether.
This is similar to GitHub and Twitter. Both grew out of the web, but have increasingly acquired or built desktop clients, not to mention mobile ones. And Facebook has made an about-turn on HTML5 everywhere and focusing heavily on native mobile apps.
So I see a trend is that cloud-based services are realising they can't just rely on a website. It would be great to see the web catch up, or even close the gap, but right now, native is offering so much more capability, that both web and native apps are necessary for prominent cloud services. That's good for users, they get the best of both worlds, but also going to be a big challenge for resource-limited startups.