Looks like the author has very vague and wrong idea about computing in the past. With so many factual errors, it is hard to accept it seriously.

> Somewhere around the late 90s or early 00s we made the decision to jump ship from desktop apps and start writing the lion’s share of new software for the web. This was largely for pragmatic reasons: the infrastructure to talk to a remote server became possible for the first time,

I am not sure what this means. Javascript (1995)? or XMLHttpRequest (2005)? You can create web apps without any of this technologies -- they make web apps faster and UX better, but they were not the critical pieces. for example, one of the most famouse webapps of this era -- webmail interfaces such as yahoo.com or hotmail.com -- worked just fine without javascript at all.

> good cross platform UI frameworks had always been elusive beasts,

Technically true, but misleading. This sentence seems to imply that this mattered, and web was somewhat better. Both of these are false. Back in then no one cared about non-windows systems, and the amount of effort required to display site properly on all major browsers was staggering. It was way, way easier to make desktop apps which worked on 99% of all computers than web apps which worked on 99% of the browsers.

> and desktop development frameworks were intimidating compared to more approachable languages like Perl and PHP.

This was a time of VB 6, Java, Delphi, and later this fancy .net thing. Designing a desktop all was drastically simpler that creating a website of the same complexity.

> The other reason was cosmetic: HTML and CSS gave developers total visual control over what their interfaces looked like, allowing them to brand them and build experiences that were pixel-perfect according to their own ends.

This is so false this is not even funny. The desktop apps were trivial to make pixel perfect, the web took a LOT of work (I still remember the countless nested tables with 1x1 images in them)

Here is winamp 1, released in 1997: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/09/Winamp1.006.P...

Here is web in 1997: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/09/16/the-web-in-1996-1997/

now, which one is more customized?

> This seemed like a big improvement over more limiting desktop development, but its led us to the world we have today where every interface is a different size and shape,...

And of course, the author misses the most important reasons why people spent all the effort to make the web apps. Spolsky said it back in 2004 in
http://new.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html:

> Today I installed Google's new email application by typing Alt+D, gmail, Ctrl+Enter. There are far fewer compatibility problems and problems coexisting with other software. Every user of your product is using the same version...

Then the article goes on to advertise the advantages of terminals and "terminal programs": fast startup, no animations, "interface elements are limited", optimized for advanced user, "output that I can process in some way to get into another program"
This is accompanied by a picture of emacs running in a terminal.

The problem with that, of course, is those properties are not bound to "terminal" programs at all. Many software which comes from Linux/Unix world will have all of these properties, even if they do not require terminal to run. Even graphics editors like "gimp" start up fast, have no animations, etc...

Conclusion: the only way this article makes sense if the the author equates "the terminals" with "apps without animation". The author does not seem aware of what the "terminal software" means (all communications go through a single bidirectional pipe).