> "Also, desktop apps have had the Internet for decades. What have they done with it?"
Automatic updates is the answer that springs to mind first. Is there something more they should be doing with the Internet?
The only other answer I could think of was 'social connectivity', but in the world of desktop apps, there's no major downside with splitting out social connectivity into separate apps. I don't care if a desktop 3D CAD application doesn't have chat functionality as there are specialist desktop applications for chatting online. Sharing a 3D model in a realtime online conversation is as simple as sharing a file.
So, this seems strange, to me, and maybe misses the point of the web entirely.
I'm not talking about bolted-on "social" features. There are entire multi-billion dollar industries built on categories of software that did not exist in 1990.
Google Docs isn't merely a word processor (spreadsheet, etc.) with social features...the "chat" is ancillary to the real benefits; it's an entirely different way to work with documents, and that's one of the examples of things that's extremely close to 80s/90s tech; it looks just like a word processor, and people from 1990 would know how to use it. But, it's not the same thing, and before it (and some other online document tools) came along, Word had extremely limited sharing capabilities (requiring ridiculous intranet servers to host the shared docs, and it was basically the same as passing it around via email only with slightly better revision control). That's as close to a traditional app as you can find, and it is still 100% more valuable for being on the web.
What would [ Youtube, facebook, Google Maps, Amazon, craigslist, Netflix, etc. ] look like in a desktop app, and why didn't they exist before they came to the web? The web is a unique (so far) platform with distinct benefits that aren't available to apps in that past. The reverse (desktop/native apps could do things web apps couldn't) was also true until relatively recently, but that's changing, though I don't think the interesting work is in porting native apps to web apps...people will do it, because they can, but the interesting work is in the new things made possible by the web itself.
> "Youtube, facebook, Google Maps, Amazon, craigslist, Netflix"
There's nothing stopping any of those being implemented as desktop apps. In the case of Netflix and Google Maps they already have equivalents on the desktop that are even more capable than their online equivalents, such as Kodi and Google Earth.
As for the collaborative document features of Google Docs, MS Office has this as well. The main benefit of Google Docs is its price.
Automatic updates is the answer that springs to mind first. Is there something more they should be doing with the Internet?
The only other answer I could think of was 'social connectivity', but in the world of desktop apps, there's no major downside with splitting out social connectivity into separate apps. I don't care if a desktop 3D CAD application doesn't have chat functionality as there are specialist desktop applications for chatting online. Sharing a 3D model in a realtime online conversation is as simple as sharing a file.